Specific language and reading skills in school-aged children and adolescents are associated with prematurity after controlling for IQ

▸ Prematurity contributed to the variance in measures of language and reading, even after controlling for IQ. ▸ The degree of prematurity was a significant predictor of linguistic processing speed, verbal memory, and reading comprehension. ▸ The degree of prematurity was not a significant predictor of receptive vocabulary, syntactic comprehension, or decoding. ▸ Prematurity had a direct effect on those language and reading abilities that require processing efficiency (fluid functions) as opposed to accumulated verbal-semantic knowledge (crystallized functions).