Sustained pacifier use is associated with smaller vocabulary sizes at 1 and 2 years of age: A cross‐sectional study

Abstract

Pacifier use during childhood has been hypothesized to interfere with language processing, but, to date, there is limited evidence revealing detrimental effects of prolonged pacifier use on infant vocabulary learning. In the present study, parents of 12‐ and 24‐month‐old infants were recruited in Oslo (Norway). The sample included 1187 monolingual full‐term born (without visual, auditory, or cognitive impairments) infants: 452 (230 girls; 222 boys) 12‐month‐olds and 735 (345 girls; 390 boys) 24‐month‐olds. Parents filled out an online Norwegian Communicative Development Inventory (CDI), which assesses the vocabulary in comprehension and production for 12‐month‐old infants and in production only for 24‐month‐old infants. CDI scores were transformed into age‐ and sex‐adjusted percentiles using Norwegian norms. Additionally, parents retrospectively reported their child's daytime pacifier use, in hours, at 2‐month intervals, from birth to the assessment date. Maternal education was used to control, in the analyses, for the socio‐economic status. We found that greater pacifier use in an infant's lifespan was associated with lower vocabulary size. Pacifier use later in life was more negatively associated with vocabulary size than precocious use, and increased the odds of being a low language scorer. In sum, our study moves beyond the findings of momentary effects of experimentally induced “impairment” in articulators’ movement on speech perception and suggests that, from 12 months of age, constraints on the infant's speech articulators (pacifier use) may be negatively associated with word comprehension and production.Research Highlight We examined the relationship between pacifier use and vocabulary sizes in production at 24 months of age and comprehension and production at 12 months of age. Lifespan Pacifier Use (LPU) was negatively correlated with vocabulary sizes in comprehension and production among 12‐month‐old infants and negatively correlated with production for 24‐month‐olds. Later pacifier use was found to be more negatively correlated with vocabulary size in infants, as compared to more precocious use. The amount of pacifier use in the 2 months prior to a child's second birthday was predictive of a higher prevalence of low vocabulary scores in 24‐month‐olds.