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In:Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages
Edited by Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla, Lucía Buil-Legaz, Raúl López-Penadés, Victor A. Sanchez-Azanza and Daniel Adrover-Roig
[Not in series 223] 2019
► pp. 37–56

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Prematurity, executive functions and language

A study with low risk preterm children

 | University of Santiago de Compostela
 | University of A Coruña
 | University of A Coruña
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 11 June 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/z.223.03per
This chapter aims to compare language development and executive functions (EFs) in healthy preterm (PT) and full-term (FT) children, and to explore the influence of EFs and other factors on language abilities. One group of 111 low-risk PT children and another group of 34 FT children were followed from 4 to 5 years of age, and predictors of language abilities were analysed. The PT children in our study did not obtain significantly lower results than the FT children in any EF task. Cognitive score was the main predictor of linguistic results. EFs, verbal memory and non-verbal working memory in particular, had a moderately significant effect on morphosyntactic production and on grammar understanding. The results seem to reinforce the declarative/procedural model.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Instruments
    • Procedure
    • Analyses performed
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusions
  • References
References (74)
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