Predicting reading problems in at-risk children.

This study was designed to determine early predictors of reading problems in children at risk for such problems. Three groups of children participated in the study: those with a specific language impairment; those who presumably had a language delay or disorder early in life and had no or a mild disorder at present; and a group of premature children. The data collected were standard speech and language test measures, given as the children entered the study, measures of language meta-processing abilities on an experimental battery, given 6 months after they entered the study; and standard measures of reading, given when the children were aged 80 to 96 months. Many significant relations were found between measures of oral language ability and meta-processing ability at an earlier age and reading ability in first and second grade. The language processing battery scores accounted for a somewhat greater amount of variance on the reading tests than did the scores on the standard language tests. Three ability groups, comparatively high, middle, and low, were found in the population as a result of cluster analysis. Some premature children and some children with early language disorder or mild language disorder at entry into the study, as well as most SLI children, were members of the low language-ability group. These data were then examined to see if membership in the low language-ability group, as measured by either standard speech and language tests or the language meta-processing battery predicted at-risk reading performance on the WRAT. Forty-six children were found to be at risk by this test. Twenty-one of the children were identified by either set of measures, an additional 10 were identified by the language meta-processing measures alone, an additional 3 by the intake measures alone, and 12 of the children were not identified by either set of measures as potential problem readers. The results indicate that early measures of language awareness are good predictors of later reading performance but that different measures of this awareness are good predictors for different children.

Patterns of early lexical and cognitive development in premature and full-term infants.

The linguistic and cognitive development of 26 premature and 27 full-term infants was studied longitudinally over the first 3 years of life. Infants in the premature population included 12 who were below 1500 g in birthweight and an even larger number with "at risk" signs. Language samples were collected in the home approximately every other month, the children were given experimenter-designed tests periodically, and mothers were asked to keep diaries of their children's lexical development. The children were given standardized tests as they exited the study. Cognitive development was also measured periodically. The patterns of lexical and cognitive development of the prematures did not differ markedly from those of full-term infants. There were no significant differences between the prematures as a whole and the full-term infants on standard language test measures as they exited from the study. There were significant differences between the very low birthweight and full-term infants on two of the exit measures. However, the performance of the very low birthweight infants was well within the range of normal on these two measures. The nature of the study and the factors that might have led to lack of differences between the two groups are discussed.