Longitudinal follow-up of hearing, speech, and language skills in 6-year-old children with congenital moderate hearing loss.

Objectives: Children born with moderate hearing loss present with speech and language outcomes at both ends of the spectrum. To explore reasons for this, the objective of this study was to follow up a group of children born with moderate sensorineural hearing loss at 6 years of age (n = 7) by investigating their outcomes in hearing, speech, and language development from time point of hearing aid fitting at 6 months. Another objective was to investigate the relationship between earlier outcomes on precursing variables to the current status in auditory, speech and language development.

Follow-up of expressive language and general development at 12, 18 and 36 months for children with no canonical babbling at 10 months.

Little is known about the developmental trajectories in children who do not use canonical babbling (CB) at 10 months. The aim was to examine how speech, language, cognitive and motor abilities developed in children without CB. For 15 children identified as not having CB, consonant production, expressive vocabulary and general development were assessed at 12, 18 and 36 months from audio-video recordings.

Babbling in extremely premature infants at 12 months corrected age.

Babbling is an important precursor to speech in infancy, and deviations from the typical babbling development can predict later difficulties in speech, language, and communication. This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate babbling and early speech in Swedish extremely premature infants. Samples of babbling were collected from 20 extremely premature infants (EPT group) at the corrected age of 12 months.

Asking parents about babbling at 10 months produced valid answers but did not predict language screening result 2 years later.

Aim: We evaluated the concurrent and predictive validity of questions to parents of 10-month-old children about babbling.

Methods: Children with at least one native Swedish-speaking parent were eligible for inclusion in this prospective longitudinal study. The parents were asked three questions about babbling at a routine healthcare visit.

Parents' contingent responses in communication with 10-month-old children in a clinical group with typical or late babbling.

Parental responsive behaviour in communication has a positive effect on child speech and language development. Absence of canonical babbling (CB) in 10-month-old infants is considered a risk factor for developmental difficulties, yet little is known about parental responsiveness in this group of children. The purpose of the current study was to examine proportion and type of parental responsive utterances after CB and vocalization utterances respectively in a clinical group of children with otitis media with effusion, with or without cleft palate.

Observation is a valid way of assessing common variables in typical babbling and identifies infants who need further support.

Aim: It is important to identify speech and language difficulties in children as early as possible. This study investigated the validity of observing babbling structure and consonant articulation.

Methods: We focused on the language capabilities of children, with and without cleft palates, at 12 months of age (n = 29) and 18 months of age (n = 38), comparing observations made by speech and language pathologists on babbling structure and consonant articulation to audio recordings phonetically transcribed by experts blinded to the aim of the study.