Phonological awareness in typically developing and low risk preterm children.

PÉREZ-PEREIRA, M.; RESCHES, M.

Lyon

Congreso; 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language; 2017

IASCL

Phonological awareness has been considered an important predictor of literacy. Different investigations found that very or extremely (high risk) preterm children show global (Sansavini et al., 2008; Wolke & Meyer, 1999) or specific (Guarini et al., 2010) difficulties in phonological awareness (PA). Do low risk preterm children, however, exhibit this pattern?The aim of this presentation are: 1) To compare PA in low risk preterm children to that of full term children, as well as 2) to analyze which factors predict PA. In the search for predictors we paid special attention to different linguistic abilities (vocabulary understand- ing, comprehension of syntax and morphosyntactic production), cognition, executive functions (work- ing memory and inhibition), gestational age (GA) and socio-demographic variables. The participants were 108 low risk preterm children, classi ed into 3 groups of different GAs, and 33 full-term children 5 years old. The children were assessed when they were 4 and 5 years of age with standardized tests in Spanish. The results show that there is no signi - cant difference in PA between PR and FT children. Multiple regression analysis indicates that cognitive ability, morphosyntactic production ability and work- ing memory contribute in a signi cant way to explain PA. No other linguistic abilities (word or grammar understanding) seem to have any effect on PA. Nor is there any effect of GA on PA. These results are dis- cussed in relation to previous studies