Frontal lobe functioning in conduct disordered juveniles: preliminary findings.

This investigation assessed the hypothesis that conduct disordered juveniles may suffer from a maturational lag in the development of behaviors believed associated with the frontal cortex. Twenty conduct disorder (CD) juveniles and 20 normal comparison subjects were compared on nine Lurian tasks that measure behavior attributed to frontal lobe functioning. A three-way ANOVA, with gender, race, and group as factors of interest, revealed significant differences on the verbal conflict task, verbal retroactive inhibition task, and on a measure of receptive vocabulary. Using receptive vocabulary as a covariate, an ANCOVA showed no significant differences between the groups on any of the tasks. These findings appear to support the potential impact that language dysfunction can have in the development of disinhibitory behavior. Other interpretations of the findings are presented.