Abstract

Studies show that an important number of children born preterm (before 37 weeks of gestation) present difficulties in their development, including language development. Studies indicate that some biomedical complications such as intraventricular hemorrhage (grades III and IV), periventricular leukomalacia, and bronchopulmonary dysplasia increase the probability of presenting alterations in cognition and/or language development, and thus there is a need for studies which provide more information that allows anticipating possible consequences in the learning process of children born prematurely. Therefore, the aims of this study were to measure the early vocabulary size in very preterm and extremely preterm children (with and without biomedical complications) at 24 months of corrected age, and to determine the association between the number of biomedical complications and vocabulary size. To that effect, we worked with 108 children divided into three groups: 39 highrisk preterm children (with biomedical complications), 36 low-risk preterm children (without biomedical complications associated with alterations in language and/or cognition), and 33 full term children. All children were evaluated with the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory II. Our results show that full term children have a significantly larger vocabulary size than preterm children, and that no differences exist between the results of high-risk versus low-risk preterm children. On the other hand, vocabulary size does not correlate with biomedical complications.