Relationship of Middle Ear Disease in Early Childhood to Later Narrative and Attention Skills

Abstract

The present study examined narrative skills and attention in a prospective study of 44 children whose histories of otitis media experience varied over the first 3 years of life. A regression model was designed to examine whether narrative skills at 5 and 7 years of age could be predicted from a number of potent predictors, including mother's IQ, mother's education, the home environment, the WPPSI IQ at 5 years, and the frequency and duration of otitis media in the first 36 months of life. Using a backward elimination procedure, the model did not predict global language measures such as mean length of utterance (MLU), but it did predict narrative skill at 5 and 7 years of age, with the final model including the WPPSI and otitis media as significant predictors. Post hoc analyses indicated a possible threshold effect as well as more off-task behavior during kindergarten work times for those children with a high frequency of past olitis media.