Language abilities in preterm-born children : Specific difficulties in phonological skills

Children who were born prematurely (before 37 weeks’ gestation) are at greater risk for a range of impairments in cognitive, motor, social-emotional, and academic functioning (e.g., Bos et al., 2013). Other developmental disorders, such as language delays and deficits, are also more common in preterm children (Van Noort et al., 2012). Because language function is essential in all kinds of social and academic life (Young et al., 2002), it is crucial to better identify and characterize language impairment in preterm-born children. Despite the large amount of research conducted on language abilities in preterm children, little is known about their phonological development (Barre et al., 2011). In the present study, we investigated differences in several phonological tasks between French-speaking premature children and in term-born control children.
30 children born at <35 weeks’ gestation (4 to 5 years old) and with low-birth weight (1215 g on mean) were recruited. These preterm children were matched to 30 children born at term on gender, chronological age and socio-economic level. All participants were administered five language tasks (phonemic discrimination, phonological judgment, pictures naming, pseudo-words repetition and phonological awareness) in order to precisely assess their phonological skills.
Results indicated that preterm children presented poorer performance than control term-born children when they had to discriminate between different phonemes (phonemic discrimination abilities), to detect phonemic modifications (phonological judgment) and to recognize and identify syllabic segments (phonological awareness). Differences between both groups have also been observed in the quality of phonological representations (pictures naming task). However, both groups of children performed equally well in the pseudo-words repetition task.
These findings revealed that preterm children score significantly lower compared with term-born children on several phonological tests, a language subdomain which is particularly important in the initial stages of language development and for reading.