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Visual scanning of a talking face in preterm and full-term infants

Elena Berdasco-Muñoz1, Thierry Nazzi1, H Henny Yeung1

  • 1Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center.

Developmental Psychology
|May 10, 2019
PubMed

Insights

Preterm infants struggle to differentiate native from nonnative languages when viewing audiovisual speech. This audiovisual speech perception deficit is evident even in later-born preterm infants, impacting early language development.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Speech Perception

Background:

  • Preterm birth (< 37 weeks gestation) poses long-term health and neurodevelopmental risks.
  • Early language development is influenced by auditory and visual input, potentially sensitive to preterm birth effects.
  • Audiovisual speech perception, crucial for language acquisition, may be uniquely affected in preterm infants.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate audiovisual speech perception in preterm infants at 8 months postnatal age.
  • To compare visual scanning patterns of preterm and full-term infants processing native and nonnative languages.
  • To determine if preterm birth impacts the ability to differentiate languages based on audiovisual cues.

Main Methods:

  • Tested extremely preterm to late preterm infants (28-36 weeks gestation) and two full-term control groups (8 months postnatal, 6 months maturational age).
  • Infants viewed a video of a bilingual speaker (French-English).
  • Measured visual scanning patterns (eye and mouth focus) during native (French) and nonnative (English) speech presentation.

Main Results:

  • Preterm infants displayed similar visual scanning patterns for both native and nonnative languages.
  • Full-term infants showed differential scanning, looking more at the eyes than the mouth for the native language.
  • No correlation found between scanning patterns and the degree of prematurity.

Conclusions:

  • Audiovisual speech perception is affected in preterm infants, even those born later preterm.
  • Preterm infants exhibit a deficit in differentiating languages based on audiovisual speech cues.
  • This vulnerability in audiovisual processing may contribute to other language difficulties observed in preterm populations.

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