BackgroundEarly auditory experiences are a prerequisite for speech and language acquisition. In healthy children, phoneme discrimination abilities improve for native and degrade for unfamiliar, socially irrelevant phoneme contrasts between 6 and 12 months of age as the brain tunes itself to, and specializes in the native spoken language. This process is known as perceptual narrowing, and has been found to predict normal native language acquisition. Prematurely born infants are known to be at an elevated risk for later language problems, but it remains unclear whether these problems relate to early perceptual narrowing. To address this question, we investigated early neurophysiological phoneme discrimination abilities and later language skills in prematurely born infants and in healthy, full-term infants.ResultsOur follow-up study shows for the first time that perceptual narrowing for non-native phoneme contrasts found in the healthy controls at 12 months was not observed in very prematurely born infants. An electric mismatch response of the brain indicated that whereas full-term infants gradually lost their ability to discriminate non-native phonemes from 6 to 12 months of age, prematurely born infants kept on this ability. Language performance tested at the age of 2 years showed a significant delay in the prematurely born group. Moreover, those infants who did not become specialized in native phonemes at the age of one year, performed worse in the communicative language test (MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories) at the age of two years. Thus, decline in sensitivity to non-native phonemes served as a predictor for further language development.ConclusionOur data suggest that detrimental effects of prematurity on language skills are based on the low degree of specialization to native language early in development. Moreover, delayed or atypical perceptual narrowing was associated with slower language acquisition. The results hence suggest that language problems related to prematurity may partially originate already from this early tuning stage of language acquisition.

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Middle ear disease in infancy had a significant adverse effect on reading comprehension as late as 9 years of age, even among children whose acute episodes were effectively treated.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) vary widely in their ability to use tense/agreement inflections depending on the type of language being acquired, a fact that current accounts of SLI have tried to explain. Finnish provides an important test case for these accounts because: (1) verbs in first and second person permit null subjects whereas verbs in third person do not; and (2) tense and agreement inflections are agglutinating and thus one type of inflection can appear without the other. Probes were used to compare the verb inflection use of Finnish-speaking children with SLI, and both age-matched and younger typically developing children. The children with SLI were less accurate, and the pattern of their errors did not match predictions based on current accounts of SLI. It appears that children with SLI have difficulty learning complex verb inflection paradigms apart from any problem specific to tense and agreement.

Speech development, the occurrence of articulatory errors, speech therapy received and literacy were evaluated in children at preschool and school age. Data were obtained with questionnaires sent to the parents and teachers of 1,708 second-grade children in 119 school classes selected by multistage random sampling among Finnish-speaking schools throughout the country. Completed questionnaires were received from 1,531 parents (89.6%) and 1,601 teachers (93.7%). Early speech development was slower among the boys than among the girls. The proportion of children with articulatory errors decreased from 32.5% at the age of 5 years to 18.4% at 7 years and 7.4% at 9 years, and the boys had more articulation problems than the girls. Errors in two or more sounds at school age were rare, and more than 90% of all errors were in the sounds /r/ and /s/. About one fourth of the girls (26.7%) and one sixth of the boys (18.1%) had gained preschool literacy; 2.9% of the girls and 6.6% of the boys were still not able to read fluently by the middle of the fourth term. The difference between the sexes was seen both in the early development of speech and articulatory problems and in literacy at the age of 9.