Early language development in preterm children without neurological damage: a longitudinal study

Children born at a very low gestational age, even those without neurosensory damages, are at risk of linguistic disorders. This longitudinal study aimed at analyzing communicative and language abilities in preterm children during their second year of life, through a standardized questionnaire, with particular attention to the communicative and language abilities that predict the first verbal skills. Our results showed that preterm children are slower than full-terms in language acquisition particularly at earlier stages of development. The differences between the two groups of children was significant only at 16 and 18 months. Preterms use more simplistic linguistic categories for longer than full-terms, with regards to lexicon composition and syntactic complexity. This different pattern could involve more qualitative, rather than quantitative, aspects of developmental processes that characterize language acquisition in preterms and full-term children.