IMPORTANCE Successful acquisition of language is foundational for health and well-being across the life course and is patterned by medical and social determinants that operate in early life. OBJECTIVE To investigate the associations of neighborhood disadvantage, gestational age, and English as first language with speech, language, and communication concerns among children aged 27 to 30 months.

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1AbstractBackgroundPreterm birth is associated with atypical cognitive and socioemotional outcomes in childhood. Secure infant attachment protects against adverse outcomes, but could be modified by alterations in the early caregiving environment inherent to essential neonatal intensive care or co-morbidities of preterm birth. We aimed to test the hypothesis that preterm birth is associated with differences in infant attachment compared with infants born at term, and to investigate clinical, neurodevelopmental and socioeconomic variables that could contribute to variance in infant attachment.Methods68 preterm and 68 term infants with mean (range) gestational age at birth 29.7 (22.1 – 32.9) and 39.6 (36.4 – 42.1) weeks, respectively, completed the Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) at nine months of corrected age. Attachment dimensions and categories were obtained from infant responses to the SFP using a published coding scheme, and an alternative principal component and clustering strategy. Neurodevelopment was assessed using the Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scales, and socioeconomic status was operationalized as neighborhood deprivation.ResultsPreterm and term infants did not differ in attachment dimensions (distress, fretfulness, attentiveness to caregivers, p-values > .07; principal components, p-values > .07), or the distribution of attachment categories (attachment styles, p-value = .79; attachment clusters, p-value > .78). In the whole sample, fretfulness correlated with socioeconomic deprivation (n = 136, rs = -0.23, p-value < .01), and attentiveness correlated with motor development (n = 120, rs = .24, p-value < .01).ConclusionsThere were no differences in attachment between preterm and term infants at nine months of age, suggesting that caregiver-infant attachment relationships are resilient to the effects of prematurity on the developing infant. The results highlight links between socioeconomic deprivation and infant attachment, and suggest there is a relationship between infant attentiveness and motor function in infancy.