Research in developmental disabilities
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study
The relationship between multiple developmental difficulties in very low birth weight children at 3½ years of age and the need for learning support at 5 years of age.
This study investigated whether multiple developmental difficulties are more frequent in very low birth weight (VLBW) children than in those born full term. The association between multiple developmental difficulties assessed at 3½ years of age and educational provision for the child at 5½ years was also investigated, with 'educational provision' referring to the curriculum, school placement and the level of learning support. There were 143 VLBW children without cerebral palsy (CP) and 41 term-born peers assessed at 3½ years of age. ⋯ Multiple logistic regression analyses showed that of the difficulties, impaired motor coordination was most strongly associated with the requirement for learning support two years later. Regression analyses showed that having multiple difficulties was significantly associated with the need for learning support (Odds Ratio of 3.4 (95% CI: 1.5-7.8). These results show that the presence of multiple difficulties in a VLBW child of preschool age, can impact the child's educational provision two years later.
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Children with SLI exhibit overall deficits in novel word learning compared to their age-matched peers. However, the manifestation of the word learning difficulty in SLI was not consistent across tasks and the factors affecting the learning performance were not yet determined. Our aim is to examine the extent of word learning difficulties in Mandarin-speaking preschool children with SLI, and to explore the potent influence of existing lexical knowledge on to the word learning process. ⋯ The results suggested that the word learning difficulty in children with SLI occurred in the process of establishing a robust phonological representation at the beginning stage of word learning. Also, implicit compound knowledge is applied to aid word learning process for children with and without SLI. We also provide the empirical data to validate the relationship between preschool children's word learning performance and their existing receptive vocabulary ability.