Parental use of causal language for preterm and full-term children: a longitudinal study

Abstract

Parents are often a good source of information, introducing children to how the world around them is described and explained in terms of cause-and-effect relations. Parents also vary in their speech, and these variations can predict children's later language skills. Being born preterm might be related to such parent-child interactions. The present longitudinal study investigated parental causal language use in Turkish, a language with particular causative morphology, across three time points when preterm and full-term children were 14-, 20-, and 26-months-old. In general, although preterm children heard fewer words overall, there were no differences between preterm and full-term groups in terms of the proportion of causal language input. Parental causal language input increased from 20 to 26 months, while the amount of overall verbal input remained the same. These findings suggest that neonatal status can influence the amount of overall parental talk, but not parental use of causal language.