Little is known about language development after late‐to‐moderate premature birth, the most significant part of prematurity worldwide. We examined minimal‐pair word‐learning skills in 18 eighteen‐month‐old healthy full‐term (mean gestational age [GA] at birth = 39.6 weeks; 7 males; 100% Caucasian) and 18 healthy late‐to‐moderate preterm infants (mean GA at birth 33.7 weeks; 11 males; 100% Caucasian). Data were collected in the local urban area of Barcelona city from May 2015 to August 2016. Toddlers first associated two pseudo‐words, forming a minimal pair based on a voice onset time distinction of the initial consonant, with two unfamiliar objects during a habituation phase. A visual choice test assessed their recognition of the two novel word‐object associations and some familiar word‐object pairs. While full‐terms successfully mapped the similar sounding pair of novel words (d = 1.57), preterms could not (d = 0.17). These results suggest that late to moderate preterm birth can hinder basic associative learning mechanisms relying on fine temporal speech features.

中文翻译：

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晚至中度早产对最小配对单词学习的影响


对于晚至中度早产（全世界早产中最重要的部分）后的语言发展知之甚少。我们检查了 18 名 18 个月健康足月婴儿（出生时平均孕龄 [GA]= 39.6 周；7 名男性；100% 白种人）和 18 名健康晚至中度早产儿的最小配对单词学习技能（出生时平均 GA 33.7 周；11 名男性；100% 白人）。数据于 2015 年 5 月至 2016 年 8 月在巴塞罗那市当地城区收集。幼儿在习惯化阶段首先将两个伪词与两个不熟悉的物体相关联，根据声母辅音的发声时间区别形成最小对。 。视觉选择测试评估了他们对两种新颖的词-宾关联和一些熟悉的词-宾对的识别。虽然足月成功地映射了一对发音相似的新词（d = 1.57），但早产儿却不能（d = 0.17）。这些结果表明，晚期至中度早产可能会阻碍依赖于精细时间言语特征的基本联想学习机制。