investigation of language delays in preterm babies using a Norwegian sibling cohort
The article by Zambrana et al., (2020), involves an investigation of language delays in preterm babies using a Norwegian sibling cohort. The researchers recruited 26,769 siblings as participants with preterm deliveries of between 23 weeks and 42 weeks. The assessment of language delay was performed when the children reached 1.5, 3, and 5 years of age. The selected babies were grouped into different age groups based on the delivery duration, including very early preterm below 26 weeks, early preterm 28-36 weeks, late preterm 38-38 weeks, and full-term over 39 weeks. The assessment of the selected babies using the Ages and Stages
Questionnaires (ASQ) communication subscales based on maternally reported items showed that preterm children born before 37 weeks had high risks of language delays. According to the authors, “at 3 and 5 years, only children born before week 34 had increased risk for language delay, children born between weeks 29-33 and before 29 weeks had increased risk of language delays at 1.5 years old.” As such, there is a significant correlation between language delay and preterm delivery.
The article by Kostilainen et al. (2020) investigated the effect of preterm delivery on auditory processing by examining the neural processing of changes in speech-sound in babies born before the end of the gestational period in comparison to babies born in full-term. The study involved 21 preterm and 21 full-term participant babies for the examination of emotional information processing as well as the automatic change-detection. The selected children were examined using the multi-feature mismatch negativity model that can defect phonetic deviants in babies. The authors recorded a change in vowel duration, and the intensity changes during sound processing. The study found positive multi-feature mismatch negativity in both groups of infants to the emotional stimulus. The study results showed that “preterm infants elicited more positive MMRs to the phonetic deviants, unlike the full-term infants.” However, there were no significant differences in the neural processing of speech between full-term and preterm babies. As such, language delays in preterm babies are mainly due to other factors not related to neural processing.