Title: Receptive language growth in children with cerebral palsy between 18 and 54 months of age.
Legend: Left panel: Language comprehension age equivalencies versus chronological age. Individual curves plot the longitudinal trajectory for a given child. Bold (solid red and black dashed) are average trajectories for each of two classes of children. The classes are fully determined and distinguished by the longitudinal trajectory data, and strongly separate the two groups. Right panel: Using only data from ages 24 and 30 months, we predicted membership in Group 1 (left panel). The plot shows the ROC curve and its 95% confidence interval. The very high area under the curve (97%) shows that class membership can be predicted nearly perfectly using only data obtained before age 3 years.
Citation: Katherine C. Hustad, Ashley Sakash, Aimee Teo Broman, Paul J. Rathouz. Receptive language growth in children with cerebral palsy between 18 and 54 months of age. In preparation.
Abstract: Objectives – 1. To examine receptive language developmental trajectories between 24-54 months for three clinical profile groups of children with cerebral palsy and to quantify differences from age-level expectations. 2. To identify latent classes of comprehension development and relate classes to clinical profile groups. 3. To examine how well early language comprehension performance predicts later outcomes.
Methods – 85 children with cerebral palsy (43 girls, 42 boys) were followed longitudinally between 18 and 54 months. Children were seen between 2-8 times, for a total of 322 data points. Children were classified into clinical profile groups following Hustad et al. (2010). Language comprehension age equivalent scores were the dependent variable.
Results – Children with anarthria had significant language delays, limited developmental change over time, and comprised their own latent class. Children with speech motor impairment had a slight but constant receptive language delay over time. Children with CP and no speech motor impairment had age appropriate receptive language over time. Children with CP who could speak comprised their own latent class, with developmentally typical receptive language trajectories. Early language comprehension scores from all children were highly predictive of later latent profile group membership.
Conclusion – Receptive language measurements before age 3 years are highly predictive of future trajectory and impairments.
About the Lab: Paul Rathouz’s areas of methodological interests include missing data in models for highly stratified or longitudinal data, generalized linear models, methods for behavior genetic designs and outcome-dependent sampling. Most of his current applied statistical work is in the areas of developmental psychopathology, epidemiological sleep research, and arsenic exposure studies.