QOS-13: LANGUAGE PROCESSING IN MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN DIAGNOSED WITH MEDULLOBLASTOMA

Cognitive impairment is a significant comorbidity in children with posterior fossa brain tumors. Several studies have found that the functional brain organization of bilinguals and monolinguals have distinct and shared sites that support language. This retrospective study aims to examine the post-treatment performance on language tasks of monolingual (N = 9) and bilingual (N = 11) children with medulloblastoma. Hierarchical regression analyses were performed examining verbal comprehension (VC), word reading (WR), and expressive (EV) and receptive vocabulary (RV) as outcomes. Age at diagnosis, age at testing, cerebellar mutism history, gender, and SES were predictors. Bilingualism was entered in Step 2 to examine ΔR². The models explained 68% to 95% of the variance in language outcomes. Bilingualism accounted for a significant amount of variance above and beyond other predictors for VC (ΔR² = .20, p < .05), WR (ΔR² = .07, p < .05) and EV (ΔR² = .30, p = .01), but not RV. The strongest predictors of VC were bilingualism (β = -.58, p < .05), time since diagnosis (β = -.56, p < .05), cerebellar mutism (β = .56, p < .05), and gender (β = .43, p < .05). A comparable pattern was found when predicting EV. The strongest predictors of WR were time since diagnosis (β = -.60, p < .001), cerebellar mutism (β = -.43, p < .01), and bilingualism (β = 0.33, p < .05). The best outcomes were for monolinguals girls without cerebellar mutism who were assessed shortly after the end of treatment. As the age of second language acquisition is an important mediator in the development of language, neural tumors during critical periods of neurodevelopment may impose a negative influence on a child's language abilities.