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After hemispherectomy (removal or disconnection of an entire cerebral hemisphere) in childhood for treatment of intractable epilepsy, gross speech and language functions are often rescued. Whether more complex functions, such as syntactic processing, are selectively impaired, remains controversial. Here we present a cross-sectional study of expressive and receptive language functions in 30 patients who have undergone hemispherectomy (17 left, 13 right). The patients had developed epilepsy-induced pathology either during the pre/perinatal period (19 cases), or after a period of normal development (11 cases; onset range=20 months to 10 years). The patients were assessed at least 1 year post surgery on tests of receptive vocabulary, expressive and receptive grammar, instruction comprehension, and semantic association. Measures of verbal and nonverbal intelligence, short-term verbal memory, and …