Chapter published in:
Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages
Edited by Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla, Lucía Buil-Legaz, Raúl López-Penadés, Victor A. Sanchez-Azanza and Daniel Adrover-Roig
[Not in series 223] 2019
► pp. 57–74

Risk for language delay in healthy preterm and full-term children

A longitudinal study from 22 to 60 months

| National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina
| Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
| Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
| Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

This study analysed the Risk for Language Delay (RLD) in a sample of healthy preterm children and a full-term control group. We collected direct and indirect measures of language development from 10 to 60 months, and we examined the influence of biomedical, cognitive and environmental variables over the RLD at 22, 30, and 60 months. While at the early ages there were not significant differences in the prevalence of RLD between preterm and full-term children, at 60 months receptive grammar delay was more frequent in the preterm group. Also, preterm children showed a higher instability in the prevalence of RLD over time. Lastly, cognitive development, maternal education and early expressive vocabulary were the most important factors to predict RLD.

Keywords: language delay, preterm children, lexical development, grammatical development
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Methodology
    • Participants
    • Measures and instruments
    • Linguistic measures
    • Cognitive and other contextual measures
    • Procedure
    • Analyses performed
  • Results
    • Descriptive language, cognitive and environmental measures in PR and FT children
    • PR and FT children’s RLD from 22 to 60 months
    • Predicting RLD at 22, 30 and 60 months
  • Discussion
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 11 June 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.223.04res
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