Lexicogrammatical skills in 2-year-old children with and without repaired cleft palate

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the current research was to compare the lexical–grammatical skills of two-year-old children with and without repaired cleft palate (CP), accounting for the effect of variables such as vocabulary size at 18 months of age, maternal education level, and gender. Participants included 52 children with CP and 25 typically developing (TD) children. The CDI-WS was employed to measure vocabulary and grammatical skills. Significant differences were observed between the CP and TD groups with respect to the number of words, word forms (irregular nouns and verbs), word endings (overuse of plural (-s) and past tense (-ed) markers), the mean number of morphemes in their three longest utterances (M3L), and sentence complexity. In addition, compared to TD children, significantly smaller proportions of children with CP were observed to use words to talk about past and future events or use words to talk about an absent object. The difference between the CP and TD groups in terms of the size of vocabulary at 24 months of age remained statistically significant in the multivariable model. Among all predictors, the size of vocabulary at 18 months of age was identified as the most robust precursor of lexical and grammatical skills at 24 months of age. Gender was identified as a predictor of the M3L measure as an index for syntactic ability.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocabulary
• morphology
• syntax
• children
• cleft palate

Acknowledgments

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Amelia Drake, Kristen Lynch, Marina Pastore Rampazzo, Daniela Vivaldi, Maureen Feldbaum, Jacqueline Dorry, Linda Vallino, Katie McGraft, Adriane Baylis, and Katie Garcia in various aspects of data collection and/or analysis.

Declaration of Interest Statement

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01DE022566 to Dr. David Zajac. Other than this, the authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research of the National Institutes of Health [R01DE022566].