The language abilities of 42 8-year-old preterm children with birth weight <1750 g from a 1-year birth cohort in northern Finland was studied with four different language tests. Control children from the same birth cohort matched individually with their preterm pairs for age, sex, twinship, mother's education, place of residence, birth order and family type were also studied. In psycholinguistic test, auditory skills did not differ between the preterm and the full-term groups. Nor did any other linguistic subtest differentiate between the groups. Instead, the preterm children scored significantly poorer than their controls in visual subtests. The study also showed that the poor performance in visual tests was associated with neonatal morbidity, namely neonatal infections, need for continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment and patent ductus arteriosus (PDA). When studying the language abilities of preterm children, we suggest that qualitative methods should be used to analyse linguistic skills. We recommend versatile follow-up of preterm children until school age.