Children born prematurely are often at increased risk for poor executive functioning — cognitive processes that include paying attention, planning, memory, decision-making, carrying out a task, among others. Researchers say this is one of the reasons misconceptions arose that speaking more than one language can interfere with language acquisition or cause delays.
 
The researchers followed a small group of 17 children, between the ages of 6 and 7, born very preterm (before 35 weeks) with low birth weight and long hospital stays in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). There were eight monolingual children and nine children who spoke English and Spanish.
 
To test their executive function, researchers gave the children a Creature Counting task — a test that had them counting the number of animals from top to bottom, starting with one, and then switching between counting upward or downward, according to arrows. The ability to switch from counting upward to downward or vice versa is key to measuring executive functioning. Correct responses and the time it took to complete the task were recorded.
 
Preterm-born bilingual children performed significantly more accurately and with more total switches than the preterm-born monolingual children.
 
The study’s authors point out that although they had a small sample size, their preliminary data has real-world implications and shines a light on the advantages bilingualism may give to preterm-born children's executive functioning abilities.
 
“This really shows speaking more than one language can be tremendously helpful for preterm-born children just as it is for children born full term,” said FIU Psychology Professor and study author Daniel Bagner.
 
Next, the team hopes to also explore additional advantages that may arise when preterm-born children speak more than one language, including spatial reasoning (the understanding of how objects can move in a 3-dimensional world), and meta-linguistic awareness (the ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language and figure out rules and patterns).
 
“Unfortunately, many parents who have a child that was born prematurely have shared with us that their pediatric provider advised them to stop using their native language at home. They were told to use English only with their child,” said Melissa Baralt, FIU psycholinguistics professor and one of the study’s authors. “We hope this research can serve as a call-to-action for parents and healthcare professionals to embrace the advantages of bilingualism in nurturing the developmental skills of preterm-born children.”
 
The study was funded by The Language Learning Small Research Grant Program, the Sherry Kranys Baptist Children’s Hospital Innovation Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and was conducted in partnership with Ashley Darcy-Mahoney, neonatal nurse practitioner and nursing professor at The George Washington University School of Nursing.

Only mosquitoes transmit malaria. According to Jun Li — associate professor of biological sciences, Biomolecular Sciences Institute researcher and one of the study’s authors — malaria spreads when a mosquito bites someone with malaria, and the parasites in the blood infect the mosquitoes. Ten days later, infected mosquitoes can bite another person and transmit the disease to them. Using AST to prevent parasites from spreading to mosquitoes breaks the malaria life cycle.

The team has received a U.S. patent for the chemical synthesis of, and methods of using AST. But before AST can become a drug — a sometimes lengthy, expensive process — the team will continue their research investigating how it enters human red blood cells, where it can be even more effective against the parasite.
 
“What’s exciting about our research is it demonstrates how chemically different AST is from other drugs and that gets us even closer to drugs that are more effective,” said Barry P. Rosen, distinguished university professor and a member of the research team. “We have a long way to go before we have a drug that goes to market, but this foundational work paves the way toward that goal.”

This research was funded by grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and National Institute of General Medical Sciences. In addition to Yoshinaga, Rosen and Li, the team included FIU College of Arts, Sciences & Education researchers Guondong Niu and Xiaohong Wang, as well as Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine researchers Kunie Yoshinaga-Sakurai and Venkadesh Nadar.