Does exclusive breastfeeding correlate with infant's early language milestone?

Abstract

This study aims to assess the correlation between the exclusive breastfeeding status with infant's early language milestone. The design of this study is the correlational study with cross sectional method. This study examined 57 infants who lived around Harapan Raya Community Health Center Pekanbaru. The age of the infants was 6 months old during the data collection. The breastfeeding status was examined by using the questionnaire. The infants early language development was assessed by using the questionnaire which was modified from ELM Scale 2 (Early Language Milestone Scale 2). The data was analyzed by using the chi square or Fisher exact test to assess the correlation of exclusive breastfeeding status with each milestone on the 6 months infants language development. The study found that exclusive breastfeeding status has correlated significantly with two language milestones which are Auditory Expressive 6 (AE 6) the infant ability to produce mono babbling (0.044) and Auditory Receptive 6 (AR 6) the infant inhibit to 'no' (0.011). This study found that exclusive breastfeeding has a correlation in infant language milestone. However due to small sampling size, further study needed to be done to assess the effect of breastfeeding for infants with the bigger scale of population.