Understanding language and cognitive deficits in very low birth weight children.

Very-low-birth-weight infants are at much higher risk for cognitive and language delays but the nature of such deficits is not clearly understood. Given increasing rates of prematurity and infants born very-low-birth-weight, examination of mechanisms that underlie poorer developmental outcome is essential. We investigated language and cognitive abilities in very-low and normal birth-weight infants to determine whether performance differences were due to poorer global cognitive performance or to deficits in specific processing abilities.