Phonotactic acquisition in healthy preterm infants.

Area of Science:

• Developmental linguistics
• Infant language acquisition
• Speech perception

Background:

• Preterm infants face higher risks for cognitive and language delays.
• Prosodic perception development in preterms may be linked to maturational age.
• Prenatal prosodic experience is reduced in preterms, confounding age assessments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if consonant-based phonotactic perception in preterm infants develops based on listening age.
• To compare developmental trajectories of phonotactic perception between full-term and preterm infants.
• To re-evaluate constraints on phonological subcomponent acquisition.

Main Methods:

• Behavioral testing of French-learning full-term and preterm infants on consonant sequence perception.
• Assessing perception of labial-coronal vs. coronal-labial sequences at different ages.
• Comparing developmental patterns based on chronological, maturational, and listening age.

Main Results:

• Full-term infants at 10 months prefer more frequent labial-coronal sequences over coronal-labial ones.
• Preterm infants at 10 months (7 months maturational age) showed similar preferences to full-term 10-month-olds.
• Developmental timing for consonant-based phonotactics in preterms aligns with listening age.

Conclusions:

• Consonant-based phonotactic acquisition in preterm infants is driven by listening age (experience).
• This finding challenges maturational constraint interpretations for prosodic acquisition.
• Different phonological subcomponents may have distinct developmental constraints.