Verbal Abuse and Cognition in the Developing Mind

This study compared a group of 90 high verbally abused and 90 low verbally abused children on tests of cognitive development. The Cognitive Assessment System made up of attention, coding (simultaneous processing and successive processing), and planning subtests were administered to the high-abused and low-abused children. Results indicate that the high-abused children scored lower than the low-abused children on all the tests. In attention and simultaneous processing tasks, the younger children in the high-abused group performed better than the older children, suggesting better attention strategies and an absence of negative thought in the younger groups of high-abused children. Girls performed better than boys on the attention task. Results suggest that verbal abuse is associated with less favorable neuropsychological functioning.