Spontaneous language of preterm children aged 4 and 5 years

Abstract

Purposes: to evaluate spontaneous language development through the Mean Length of Utterance in words (MLU-w) of children with gestational age between 28 and 36 weeks. This research also aims to study if the gestational age, birth weight, gender, and parents' level of formal education can influence that measurement. Methods: nineteen premature children (9 males, 10 females), in the age range 4-5 years old, enrolled on Lisbon area kindergartens, and considered as having typical development, participated in this research. Spontaneous speech of each child was recorded for 30 minutes and transcribed afterwards. Results: mean values of MLU-w of Portuguese premature children were significantly lower than those with typical development. A positive and significant correlation between the gestational age and the birth weight with the MLU-w was also found. The gender of the children and the parents' level of formal education showed no influence on the results. Conclusion: these results reinforce the need to identify, on these children, possible deficits, in order to prevent negative impacts in school education, and stimulate their psychosocial development.

Conversational Language in 3-Year-Old Children Born Very Preterm and at Term

“…The incidence of low language performance (scoring ≥ 1.5 SDs below the term mean PLS-5 total score, MLUm, or TNW) in children who produced > 50 utterances over 10 min in the term group (13%) was comparable to previous incidence studies using direct assessment methods (Raghavan et al, 2018;Reilly et al, 2010), whereas the incidence of low language in the preterm group (18%) was somewhat lower than expected (Foster-Cohen, Friesen, Champion, & Woodward, 2010), perhaps reflecting relatively low medical acuity in this study group. Our findings are consistent with some of the literature in this area suggesting that children born preterm demonstrate reductions in conversational MLU (Félix et al, 2017;Imgrund et al, 2019;Le Normand et al, 1995;Rice et al, 1999), sentence complexity (Grunau et al, 1990;Imgrund et al, 2019), and lexical diversity, particularly when it comes to verbs (Imgrund et al, 2019;Le Normand & Cohen, 1999), although these findings are by no means universal (Crosbie et al, 2011;Feldman et al, 1994;Grunau et al, 1990;Mahurin-Smith et al, 2014). Demographic differences between study participants may account for some of this variation-for example, two of the studies with significantly different results to ours examined an older group of children, which may reflect differences in the clinical validity of LSA in different age groups (Crosbie et al, 2011;Mahurin-Smith et al, 2014).…”

“…Despite these reported benefits, the number of studies that have applied LSA to a preterm population is minute, relative to those that use formal assessment (see Table 1). Furthermore, studies that have used LSA have been limited in only reporting a restricted range of outcomes (Craig, Evans, Meisels, & Plunkett, 1991;Félix, Santos, & Benítez-Burraco, 2017;Grunau, Kearney, & Whitfield, 1990;Le Normand, Vaivre-Douret, & Delfosse, 1995;Rice, Spitz, & O'Brien, 1999), such as mean length of utterance (MLU) only. Hence, to date, these data have helped to complement what has been measured by accompanying standardized language test outcomes but have not provided a comprehensive depth of language assessment to support differential diagnosis and guide decisions about specific and targeted intervention.…”

Análise comparativa do vocabulário expressivo de crianças nascidas pré-termo e a termo

“…The PT children may not fully recover the developmental delay, which has consequences that affect their academic performance as well. A medium-and long-term follow-up before they get into school is a means of identifying possible losses and prevent their consequences to school learning (27) .…”

The influence of prematurity on the development of phonological skills

“…Thus, these children may not recover the delay in development, causing consequences that would affect their academic performance as well. The midterm and long-term follow-up, before the child enters schools, is a means of identifying possible deviations and prevent repercussions in school learning 35 . Therefore, the early recognition of alterations in language acquisition allows the child to be benefitted from the speech-language intervention, improving their linguistic skills and reducing the risk of persisting alterations 36 .…”