INVESTIGADORES
RESCHES Mariela
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
First language development in full term and preterm low risk children
Autor/es:
PÉREZ PEREIRA, M.; RESCHES, M.; FERNÁNDEZ, P.; GÓMEZ TAIBO, M.
Lugar:
Lyon
Reunión:
Conferencia; Early Language Acquisition conference 2012 (ELA2012); 2012
Resumen:
In this presentation data from a longitudinal study carried out with 150 preterm (PR) and 49 fullterm (FT) children are provided. PR children with additional severe medical complications wereexcluded from the sample. Both groups of children were comparable in terms of gender distribution,mother´s educational level, and Apgar score (1 minute). The characteristics of the PR sampleindicate that the PR group may be characterized as low risk. The linguistic development of the children was assessed at 10 and 22 months of age through the CDI. Information on the bio-medical and environmental characteristics of the children was obtained short after the children´s birth. Other variables such as maternal depression, parental stress, home environment quality, infant cognitive development, and attachment style were also collected (most of them at 22 months of age).The results obtained indicate that no significant differences between the PR and the FT children were found in the CDI measures, although the children from the FT group tended to get slightly higher scores that those of the PR group in all the dimensions of language competence assessed by the CDI. Differences did not reach significance even when the FT children were compared to the very preterm children (VPR) (gestational age < 30 weeks).The analysis of the relative proportion of the type of words used by the children (social words, predicates, common nouns and grammatical function words) did not reveal significant differences between the PR and the FT children, and this was so even when the VPR children were compared to the FT children. These results are not in agreement with those reported by other studies (Kern &Gayraud, 2007; Stolt et al, 2007).The stepwise regression analysis performed identified the variables which partially predicted the linguistic scores of the PR and the FT children at 22 months of age. The score obtained by the children in the Batelle scale (cognitive development) was the most important predictor of the results obtained by all the children in the CDI at 22 months of age (see also Sansaviniet al, 2011). However differences between the PR and the FT children were found in the predictive role of other variables. For instance, although the score obtained in word production at 10 months of age had a predictive role for the PR children in most of the lexical and grammatical CDI measures at 22 months of age,this variable had no significant predictive role for the FT children. In contrast, although mother´s educational level and mother´s depression had a negative effect on the grammatical (MLU of the 3 longest sentences) and morphological (regular endings) development of the FT children, these variables did not have any significant predictive effect for the PR children.It is concluded that the results found must be interpreted in relation to the characteristics of the sample studied (low risk PR children), and that the discrepancy with the results found by other studies is probably related to the characteristics of the PR children they studied.