LISTENING AND LANGUAGE AT 4 YEARS OF AGE - EFFECTS OF EARLY OTITIS-MEDIA

The effect of early otitis media on preschoolers' listening and language abilities was examined in a cohort of prospectively followed children. At 4 years of age, children considered otitis negative and otitis positive during the first year of life were examined using a speech-in-competition task and several standardized measures of language and cognitive function. An adaptive test procedure was used, with sentence materials from the Pediatric Speech Intelligibility Test (PSI) (Jerger & Jerger, 1984). Results indicated that children with positive histories of otitis media during the first year required a more advantageous signal-to-competition ratio to perform at 50% sentence intelligibility than did their otitis-negative peers. There was no interaction between birth status (high-risk or full-term) and adaptive PSI listening task outcome. No differences between the groups were found in either receptive or expressive language abilities or in cognitive abilities. Further, there was no relationship between any language or cognitive measure and the adaptive PSI result.