Language Profiles and Their Relation to Cognitive and Motor Skills at 30 Months of Age: An Online Investigation of Low-Risk Preterm and Full-Term Children

Abstract

Purpose: Wide interindividual variability characterizes language development in the general and at-risk populations of up to 3 years of age. We adopted a complex approach that considers multiple aspects of lexical and grammatical skills to identify language profiles in low-risk preterm and full-term children. We also investigated biological and environmental predictors and relations between language profiles and cognitive and motor skills. Method: We enrolled 200 thirty-month-old Italian-speaking children—consisting of 100 low-risk preterm and 100 comparable full-term children. Parents filled out the Italian version of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories Infant and Toddler Short Forms (word comprehension, word production, and incomplete and complete sentence production), Parent Report of Children’s Abilities–Revised (cognitive score), and Early Motor Questionnaire (fine motor, gross motor, perception– action, and total motor scores) questionnaires. Results: A latent profile analysis identified four profiles: poor (21%), with lowest receptive and expressive vocabulary and absent or limited word combination and phonological accuracy; weak (22.5%), with average receptive but limited expressive vocabulary, incomplete sentences, and absent or limited phonological accuracy; average (25%), with average receptive and expressive vocabulary, use of incomplete and complete sentences, and partial phonological accuracy; and advanced (31.5%), with highest expressive vocabulary, complete sentence production, and phonological accuracy. Lower cognitive and motor scores characterized the poor profile, and lower cognitive and perception–action scores characterized the weak profile. Having a nonworking mother and a father with lower education increased the probability of a child’s assignment to the poor profile, whereas being small for gestational age at birth increased it for the weak profile. Conclusions: These findings suggest a need for a person centered and cross-domain approach to identifying children with language weaknesses and implementing timely interventions. An online procedure for data collection and data-driven analyses based on multiple lexical and grammatical skills appear to be promising methodological innovations.