A study reveals that children born in the pandemic develop language more slowly

The Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) has shown in a study that the covid-19 pandemic has affected the language development of children born during this stage, since it is “slower” than that of those born before the health crisis.

As part of the analysis published in the “Revista de Logopedia, Foniatría y Audiologia”, researchers have examined both vocabulary development data and morphosyntax (ability to produce increasingly complex sentences) of 153 boys and girls between the ages of 18 and 31 months old.

The Multimodal Communication and Human Development research team has been in charge of comparing data from two groups that were equal in age and in the educational level of the mothers and who studied in similar kindergartens.

These, in turn, were divided into pre-groups, of children born and evaluated before the pandemic, and post, with children born between October 2019 and December 2020.

The conclusions point out that the restrictions arising from the pandemic have limited the social interactions and relationship contexts of the children in the post group, and it is abundant that the linguistic stimuli they have received “have been affected” both by the reduction in variety and frequency of social interactions.

They have also been affected, they add, by the use of masks, which “make it difficult to understand and prevent them from taking advantage of visual information when learning language.”

According to the results, these circumstances could have contributed to a “slower” language development in this group, compared to children of the same age who lived their first two years before the pandemic.

EARLY DETECTION

The results obtained show lower scores in vocabulary and morphosyntactic development for the post group compared to the pre group, evaluated through the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI).

These findings demonstrate the sensitivity of communication and language development to social context, and highlight the importance of “closely monitoring” language development in this group, especially those children who may be at higher risk for difficulties.

They also add that early detection of any difficulties in communication and linguistic development “facilitates early intervention, thus improving the prognosis,” the authors add.