Speech and language skills in children who required neonatal intensive care

Sammanfattning: Spontaneous speech and linguistic skills at age 6 1/2 years were studied in 284 children who required neonatal intensive cam (NIC) in 1980-1985 (cohort 1) and 40 healthy controls and in 230 NIC children born in 1986-1989 (cohort 2) and 71 neonatally healthy children born at term.Eight aspects of the children's spontaneous speech in a conversation were evaluated: Information, speech motor function, sound pattern, word finding, word selection, grammar, interaction and motivation, and ten linguistic skills were assessed according to a protocol including imitation tasks, comprehension tasks and auditory functions, phonemes and word fluency. The results within each assessed area were ranked on a scale from 0 (no ability) to 5 (good ability; no errors). Mental age was assessed with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The NIC children were grouped by gestational age.Most NIC children of both cohorts had well developed spontaneous speech. Obvious deviations (grade 3) in one or more aspect of spontaneous speech were more common in all groups of NIC children than in controls. No or hardly any ability (grade 0 or 1) in an aspect of spontaneous speech was only found in children born at >32 gestational weeks.The score of the 10th percentile of controls was identified in each linguistic area of each control group and used for the analyses. In the first cohort 70% of the controls and <27% of the NIC children had no score lower than the score of the 10th percentile. The corresponding proportions in cohort 2 were 77% and 63.5% respectively. The mental age of all gestational age groups of both cohorts was >6 years.A pathological finding at cerebral ultrasound examination and being small for gestational age were associated with deficiencies in spontaneous speech and linguistic skills in NIC children.