Language Profiles and Their Relation to Cognitive and Motor Skills at 30 Months of Age: An Online Investigation of Low-Risk Preterm and Full-Term Children

Purpose: Wide interindividual variability characterizes language development in the general and at-risk populations of up to 3 years of age. We adopted a complex approach that considers multiple aspects of lexical and grammatical skills to identify language profiles in low-risk preterm and full- term children. We also investigated biological and environmental predictors and relations between language profiles and cognitive and motor skills. Method: We enrolled 200 thirty-month-old Italian-speaking children- consisting of 100 low-risk preterm and 100 comparable full-term children. Parents filled out the Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories Infant and Toddler Short Forms (word comprehension, word production, and incomplete and complete sentence production), Parent Report of Children's Abilities-Revised (cognitive score), and Early Motor Questionnaire (fine motor, gross motor, perceptionaction, and total motor scores) questionnaires. Results: A latent profile analysis identified four profiles: poor (21%), with lowest receptive and expressive vocabulary and absent or limited word combination and phonological accuracy; weak (22.5%), with average receptive but limited expressive vocabulary, incomplete sentences, and absent or limited phonological accuracy; average (25%), with average receptive and expressive vocabulary, use of incomplete and complete sentences, and partial phonological accuracy; and advanced (31.5%), with highest expressive vocabulary, complete sentence production, and phonological accuracy. Lower cognitive and motor scores characterized the poor profile, and lower cognitive and perception-action scores characterized the weak profile. Having a nonworking mother and a father with lower education increased the probability of a child's assignment to the poor profile, whereas being small for gestational age at birth increased it for the weak profile. Conclusions: These findings suggest a need for a personcentered and cross-domain approach to identifying children with language weaknesses and implementing timely interventions. An online procedure for data collection and data-driven analyses based on multiple lexical and grammatical skills appear to be promising methodological innovations.