Parents are often a good source of information, introducing children to how the world around them is described and explained in terms of cause-and-effect relations. Parents also vary in their speech, and these variations can predict children’s later language skills. Being born preterm might be related to such parent-child interactions. The present longitudinal study investigated parental causal language use in Turkish, a language with particular causative morphology, across three time points when preterm and full-term children were 14-, 20-, and 26-months-old. In general, although preterm children heard fewer words overall, there were no differences between preterm and full-term groups in terms of the proportion of causal language input. Parental causal language input increased from 20 to 26 months, while the amount of overall verbal input remained the same. These findings suggest that neonatal status can influence the amount of overall parental talk, but not parental use of causal language.

中文翻译：

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父母对早产儿和足月儿的因果语言的使用：一项纵向研究

父母通常是很好的信息来源，向孩子介绍如何用因果关系来描述和解释周围的世界。父母的言语也存在差异，这些差异可以预测孩子以后的语言技能。早产可能与这种亲子互动有关。本纵向研究调查了早产儿和足月儿童 14、20 和 26 个月大的三个时间点上父母使用土耳其语（一种具有特定使役形态的语言）的因果语言。总体而言，虽然早产儿总体听到的单词较少，但早产儿和足月组之间的因果语言输入比例没有差异。父母的因果语言输入从 20 个月增加到 26 个月，而总体言语输入量保持不变。这些发现表明，新生儿状况可以影响父母的总体谈话量，但不会影响父母对因果语言的使用。