Neurodevelopmental outcome of children born after asymmetrical IUGR is impaired in great amounts of cases. Long term consequences of IUGR deserve special attention, because they could cause poorer cognitive and language abilities, learning difficulties and lower academic level achievement.

There is a small number of data related to language development of children born after IUGR. With regard to the Croatian language there was no research on morphological knowledge for this children, although it is known that linguistic knowledge is important for reading, writing and later school success.

Therefore the goal of this paper is to determine the level of language knowledge, especially morphological knowledge and the correlation between morphological and other linguistic variables in 40 children born after IUGR and their control peers. At the time of examination all 80 children were aged between six and seven years, average cognitive abilities.

Results showed statistically significant differences between children born after IUGR and their control peers on all language tasks, particulary in morphological items: children born after IUGR were significantly poorer. There was significantly higher correlation between morphological abilities and other language abilities in children born after IUGR. It seems that biological determinants may be the reason for that stronger dependence of morphological variables on other language abilities and for the formation of a compensatory language mechanisms. Children born after IUGR are risk for difficulties in reading and writing according to the structure of their linguistic knowledge: it is important for all professionals involved in follow-up process of this children.