Background Word finding - the ability to retrieve and produce appropriate words in response to prompts or visual stimuli - is impaired in some patients with a posterior fossa tumour. Yet, few studies use preoperative assessment as a baseline, and an in-depth linguistic analysis of tasks assessing word-finding ability remains limited. The current study aims to fill this knowledge gap by analysing pre- and postoperative word-fin...

Posterior Fossa Syndrome is a common complication in children following posterior fossa tumour surgery, typically marked by transient postoperative speech impairment (POSI; i.e., mutism or reduced speech). Previous studies suggest that children who develop POSI show different language profiles postoperatively compared to those who do not. It remains unclear to what extent these language difficulties exist preoperatively and wh...

Pediatric cerebellar tumor survivors may present with spontaneous language impairments following treatment, but the nature of these impairments is still largely unclear. A recent study by Svaldi et al. (Cerebellum. 23:523-44, 2023) found a broad spectrum of spontaneous language impairments irrespective of postoperative cerebellar mutism syndrome (pCMS) diagnosis in long-term pediatric cerebellar tumor survivors. Several patien...

Following cerebellar tumour surgery, children may suffer impairments of spontaneous language. Yet, the language processing deficits underlying these impairments are poorly understood. This study is the first to try to identify these deficits for four levels of language processing in cerebellar tumour survivors. The spontaneous language of twelve patients who underwent cerebellar tumour surgery (age range 3–24 years) was compar...