Cognitive and linguistic abilities in preterm children at preschool age

Backgrounds and aims. Several studies have found general cognitive difficulties in preterm children in the first years of life, at preschool and school age (Marlow, 2004; Vohr et al., 2000). By contrast, a few studies have been carried out in order to investigate linguistic development in preterms (Sansavini et al., 2007; 2008). The purpose of our study was to ascertain whether preterm birth, without frank cerebral damage, affects cognitive and oral linguistic abilities at 6 years of age. Methods. Participants. Fifty-nine monolingual Italian preterms were recruited. They had had a gestational age &lt; 33 weeks and absence of cerebral damages. A comparison group of 24 monolingual Italian fullterms was recruited.Tools. To investigate cognitive abilities the Italian version of the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (Bonifacci et al., 2007) was administrated. Concerning oral language two Italian tasks were administered in order to investigate grammar comprehension (Chilosi & Cipriani, 1995) and lexical production (Brizzolara et al., 1994). Results. Independent sample t-tests were run to compare preterm and fullterm groups. No difference was found in cognitive abilities. By contrast, with regard to oral language, preterms made more errors than fullterms in grammar comprehension [t(81) = 6.06; p= .001] and lexical production [t(81) = 4.86; p< .001]. Conclusions. Preterm birth affects oral language, in particular lexicon and grammar, at 6 years of age, even if no delay was found in general cognitive abilities. These results highlight that the IQ is not enough to understand preterms' developmental trajectory, but specific linguistic competences should be examined.