Examining the Relationship Between Early Feeding Difficulties and Language Development: A Longitudinal Study

Increasing evidence suggests that interactive feeding is an important variable in language development, with early disruptions in feeding potentially having long-term consequences. This longitudinal experiment characterized early patterns of feeding difficulties and language development in full-term, typically-developing infants across the developmental milestones of 8, 12, 18, 24, and 54 months. Parent-directed assessments were used to assess feeding difficulties and language abilities between 8 and 24 months and a clinical language assessment was administered at 54 months. Results revealed that certain feeding difficulties, such as poor saliva control at 18 months, correlate negatively with expressive vocabulary size and may signal co-occurring and later occurring less developmentally advanced language skills at 18 and 24 months. Others, such as food selectivity, are characteristic of children with less developmentally advanced language skills at 24 months. Together, these findings suggest that feeding difficulties may reduce opportunities for language stimulation and/or reflect underlying oral-motor developmental vulnerabilities that also affect language development.