Comparison of Children of Premature and Full Term Birth who Fail in Reading

Abstract

Clinical impressions have suggested that the handicaps resulting from premature birth extend into the school ages of some individuals and act as handicaps to learning. This is at variance with the usual belief that the handicap of prematurity is soon overcome and of no particular significance thereafter. This study is an attempt to throw some light on the problem. A random sampling of one hundred cases of reading failure were studied as to birth history and the presence of certain known physical handi caps. Fifteen percent of the group were classifiable as prematurely born children1. This figure is considerably greater than the expected incidence of premature births among unselected cases. The groups were closely parallel in the proportion of each sex, in median chronological age, in median I. Q., in the incidence of the various refractive errors of the eyes and in right eyedness with right handedness. The greatest difference was in the presence of neurological lesions, of which the premature group exhibited thirty-one percent more cases than the group of poor readers born at full term. The premature group also displayed an incidence of 17% more cases of defective vision and a slower median speed of recognition for both pic tures and words. The speed of picture recognition is probably a better meas ure of reaction time than the speed of word recognition because it is not influenced by reading factors. Therefore it may be significant that half of the premature cases fell below Qt of the full term distribution in this skill. Although the two groups exhibited little difference in the incidence of such dominance combinations as right eyedness with right handedness, right eyedness with left handedness and right eyedness with ambidextrous ness, the premature group showed twenty-two percent less left eyedness