Preterm babies fare well in early language development

Washington, January 8

Preterm babies perform just as well as their full-term counterparts in a developmental task linked to language and cognition, a new study has found.

Researchers from from Northwestern University in the US tests the relative contributions of infants’ experience and maturational status.

They compared healthy preterm and full-term infants at the same maturational age, or age since conception.

The results show a robust early link between language and cognition in preterm infants, revealing that this vulnerable population begins life with a strong foundation for linking language and meaning.

“This study permits us to tease apart - for the first time ever - the roles of infants’ early experience and maturational status in establishing this critical language-cognition link,” said Sandra Waxman from Northwestern.

To illustrate, consider two infants conceived on the same date. If one happens to be born a month early, then although the infants will always share the same maturational age, the preterm infant will have an opportunity to acquire an extra month of postnatal experience listening to language.

Researchers compared preterm and full-term infants to identify the developmental timing of their link between language and object categorisation, a link previously only documented in full-term infants.

In previous work with full-term infants, researchers had shown that by three months, infants successfully form object categories while listening to language and that the language-cognition link persists throughout the first year of life.

In addition, between three and four months, full-term infants exhibit an intriguing developmental shift - at three months, they look longer at the familiar object (familiarity preference), but from four months on, they look longer at the novel object (novelty preference).

The new study was designed to capitalise on this tightly timed “familiarity-to-novelty” shift in full-term infants.

The new evidence shows the same shift in healthy preterm infants and that this developmental shift unfolds on the same maturational timetable as in their full-term counterparts.

This provides strong evidence about infants’ earliest links between language and cognition and how they unfold.

Pediatric evidence shows that although healthy preterm infants reach some developmental milestones on the same maturational timetable as their full-term peers, they nevertheless tend to encounter obstacles in language, cognitive and attentional processing capacities.

This is evident in their use of early intervention services from infancy through school age.

The study was published in the journal Developmental Science. — PTI