DEVELOPMENT OF PREMATURE BORN CHILDREN – WHAT ABOUT LANGUAGE, READING AND WRITING? THE SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST’S VIEW

INTRODUCTION It is known that premature born children are at risk for different kind of difficulties related to language, reading and writing. There are a plethora of studies suggesting a negative influence of adverse biological factors on language acquisition, specifically phonological processing and literacy in premature born children (Kirkegaard at al., 2006 ; Bayless and Stevenson, 2007 ; Luciana at al., 1999 ; Saavalainen at al., 2006). This negative influence can be observed in difficulties in language/linguistic categories important for education and academic achievement – phonological awareness, phonological working memory and phonological naming. METHODS Two groups of children, prematurely born children(n = 34) and children born at term (n = 34) were compared on a set of phonological tasks at the average age of 10.2 year. The average gestational age of prematurely born children and term born children was 34.38 weeks (29-36) and 39.26 weeks (38-41), respectively. The children were matched according to chronological age, gender and maternal educational level. The used tasks encompass phonological synthesis and analysis, spoonerism tasks, repetition of nonsense sentences, letter sequences tasks, digit span. RESULTS Prematurely born children had poorer results on phonological processing tasks in comparison with term born group (p < 0.01). The biological variables are significantly predictive of phonological processing according to the results of regression analyses and quasi-canonical correlation analysis. Therefore biological predictors should be considered as risk indicators for lower language status. Poor language abilities often cause reading and writing problems which strongly determine academic achievement of these children. CONCLUSIONS The results emphasize that biological variables present in prematurity are indicators of risk for some specific aspects of cognitive development. Speech and language pathologist’s monitoring from an early age and continuously during development in premature born children can prevent specific learning difficulties in school period.