中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare vocabulary development of lowbirth-weight (LBW), very low-birth-weigh (VLBW) pre-term and full-term toddlers at 18 to 24 months. Methods: The Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID, Bayley, 1993) was used to assess toddlers' mental ability and motor skill, and the vocabulary development inventory (VDI) which translated from MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories-Words and Sentences (Fenson, et al., 1993) was used to examine the vocabulary development. Results: The results on BSID showed that VLBW toddlers performed poor mental development than full-term toddlers, with lower mental development index (MDI) and fewer passing items in cognitive and language subscales. However, the LBW toddlers only performed fewer passing items in cognitive subscale than the full-term group. Results on VDI showed that the vocabulary size was not different in three groups, but VLBW toddlers have smaller vocabulary size on animal category than the full-term toddlers. Using the mental-age as a covariate, the results revealed that vocabulary development in the three groups was influenced by the variance of mental age instead of premature and the kinds of birth weight. Conclusions: Findings of these data demonstrated that the development of mental functioning is related to vocabulary development but not the kinds of maturity and birth weight in the toddlers with either full-term or not. This study showed that the birth status and weight were not predicative of vocabulary size in toddlers and the vocabulary development was associated with the general mental development. The overall shapes of the trajectories for the main lexical categories were highly similar between premature toddlers and full-term toddlers. The theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.