In New Zealand, approximately 10% of births are considered premature, that is less than 37 weeks gestation. With advances in medical technology, young infants are surviving gestation periods as few as 23 weeks. It is expected that many of these severely premature infants will demonstrate some problem in their academic, or cognitive function including language functioning. It is agreed that children who are born severely premature often present with language problems, the nature of the difficulties are not clear. Research examining language abilities that involve cognitive functions such as inference generation have demonstrated that children born prematurely exhibit difficulties with phonologic short-term memory and executive function. Language tasks such as inference understanding require children to integrate real-world knowledge with the linguistic information to generate and produce language that is more complex. The aim of this study was to discover if the language of children born severely premature differs from that of language-age matched peers. This study examined high-level language abilities of school-age children born severely prematurely, specifically, language tasks that involved executive functions including working memory, story inferencing, and recognising absurdities. Six children who were born less than 28 weeks gestation participated in this study. Their results on the above measures were compared to a language-aged matched comparison group, determined by performance on a standardised test. It was hypothesised that the children born severely premature would not differ from their language-age matched peers on measures of general language ability but differences would exist on measures of language processing and inferencing. The findings overall showed little difference between the preterm group and their language-age matched peers on measures except for the measure of chronological age. Although no group difference was found for the measure of working memory, a larger variance on this measure was observed in the preterm group.

Language skills developed in early childhood are important for literacy and communication in childhood as well as future adult literacy skills and health. Certain demographic characteristics and parent-child interaction skills have been identified through previous research as being influential in child language development. Parental stress has also been associated with child language outcomes. This study aims to explore whether parents’ interactive relational skills, measured by an observational method, are significantly related to children’s verbal outcome, while controlling for demographic variables and parental stress. Participants included mothers of children aged 4-6 who completed measures of parental interaction quality, parental stress, and demographic characteristics. Their children competed a language skill measure. Results indicated that even when controlling for demographic variables and parental stress, the relationship between parent-child interaction quality and child language outcomes remained significant. These findings suggest that increasing positive parent-child interaction skills may be beneficial for increasing children’s language skills.

In New Zealand, approximately 10% of births are considered premature, that is less than 37 weeks gestation. With advances in medical technology, young infants are surviving gestation periods as few as 23 weeks. It is expected that many of these severely premature infants will demonstrate some problem in their academic, or cognitive function including language functioning. It is agreed that children who are born severely premature often present with language problems, the nature of the difficulties are not clear. Research examining language abilities that involve cognitive functions such as inference generation have demonstrated that children born prematurely exhibit difficulties with phonologic short-term memory and executive function. Language tasks such as inference understanding require children to integrate real-world knowledge with the linguistic information to generate and produce language that is more complex. The aim of this study was to discover if the language of children born severely premature differs from that of language-age matched peers. This study examined high-level language abilities of school-age children born severely prematurely, specifically, language tasks that involved executive functions including working memory, story inferencing, and recognising absurdities. Six children who were born less than 28 weeks gestation participated in this study. Their results on the above measures were compared to a language-aged matched comparison group, determined by performance on a standardised test. It was hypothesised that the children born severely premature would not differ from their language-age matched peers on measures of general language ability but differences would exist on measures of language processing and inferencing. The findings overall showed little difference between the preterm group and their language-age matched peers on measures except for the measure of chronological age. Although no group difference was found for the measure of working memory, a larger variance on this measure was observed in the preterm group.

This study adds to the existing body of research by (a) including a comprehensive analysis of published reviews and primary studies investigating the effects of early identification of hearing loss and intervention on language outcomes; and (b) using advanced statistical techniques to further examine existing data on nearly 5,200 children with hearing loss. Analysis of reviews of primary studies showed these reviews exhibited severe sampling bias, lacked systematic methods for analyzing studies, and did not include a common metric for comparing results across studies nor a mechanism for analyzing how findings from primary studies covaried with other important factors such as parental involvement, fidelity of intervention, or study quality. Without a more rigorous analysis of primary studies, the conclusions drawn from these reviews are questionable. The review of primary studies revealed many methodological problems including weak experimental designs, small sample sizes, attrition or questionable sample selection methods, differences in length of treatment and characteristics of the participants, and inadequate reporting. Many researchers unjustifiably concluded that earlier intervention produced better developmental outcomes. However, almost half of the studies in which children were assessed at older ages showed no relationship between age at identification or intervention and language outcomes. Use of structural equation modeling (SEM) with the SKI*HI National Data Set did not result in models that adequately fit the underlying data. As such, these methods did not result in findings from which we can draw strong conclusions regarding the relationship between age at identification of hearing loss or intervention and child outcomes. To conclude, we know too little about whether earlier identification and intervention is better for children born with hearing loss or who acquire it at young ages. In addition to stronger research designs with sufficient sample sizes, use of reliable measures to collect a broader array of data related to important covariates, better collection of data, and measurement of intervention characteristics, perhaps we should also be asking different questions. We need to know more about what interventions, in which order, provided by whom, and in what ways are most effective for improving developmental outcomes for children with hearing loss.

Good language skills are essential to academic success. Immigrant and refugee children who enter school without previous knowledge of the societal language are more prone to failure and need of special support. The aim of this study is to describe bilingual educational program used in preschool and primary school and to examine their outcomes related to language development, both for the home language (L1) as well as the school language (L2). 17 studies were identified through a systematic literature review. Results showed a predominance of the transitional bilingual education (TBE) and two-way immersion (TWI) models in bilingual education. Language related outcomes confirmed the finding from previous literature that bilingual education doesn't inhibit L2 acquisition. Also, confirming previous literature, advantages of bilingual programs over monolingual ones are proven hard to confirm. However, several methodological issues addressed by the previous meta-analysis seem to generally persist in the most recent literature. The results of this study reiterate the need for more high- quality study in the field. Moreover, future research should also include experimentation with different languages. Finally, this argues the interest to further study and implement bilingual education programs to better accommodate the need of children with a migration background.

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