Abstract
There is evidence showing that both maturational and environmental factors can impact on later language development. On the one hand, preterm birth has been found to increase the risk of deficits in the preschool and school years. Preterm children show poorer auditory discrimination, reading difficulties, poor vocabulary, less complex expressive language and lower receptive understanding than their matched controls. On the other hand, socioeconomic status (SES) indicators (i.e., income, education and occupation) have been found to be strongly related to linguistic abilities during the preschool and school years. However, there is very little information about how these factors result in lower linguistic abilities. The present study addresses this issue. To do so, we investigated early speech perception in full and preterm infants from families classed as high or low SES. Seventy-six infants were followed longitudinally at 7.5, 9, 10.5 and 12months of age. At each test point, three studies explored infants' phonetic, prosodic and phonotactic development respectively. Results showed no significant differences between the phonetic or the phonotactic development of the preterm and the full-term infants. However, a time-lag between preterm and full-term developmental timing for prosody was found. Socioeconomic status did not have a significant effect on prosodic development. Nonetheless, phonetic and phonotactic development was affected by SES, infants from lower SES showed phonetic discrimination of non-native contrast and a preference for high-probability sequences later than their more advantaged peers. Overall these results suggest that different constraints apply to the acquisition of different phonological subcomponents.
Highlights
This study found that the amplitude of the mismatch negativity (MMN) response to a non-native vocalic phoneme contrast (i.e., Estonian vowel) diminished between 6 and 12 months of age in full-term Finnish-learning infants, but not in infants born very preterm, who showed no evidence of perceptual narrowing
The results for the prosody experiment established a significant effect of prematurity, but no effect of socioeconomic status
Infants from lower-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds were no longer able to discriminate this phonetic contrast at 12 months of age
Summary
The data of 38 preterm English-learning infants were included in the analyses. Infants were followed longitudinally at 7.5, 9, 10.5 and 12 months of chronological age (M7.5m = 7;21; range: 7;01–8;00; M9m = 9;5; range: 9;00–9;18; M10.5m = 10;19; range: 10;00–11;01; M12m = 12;06; range: 12;01–12;18; 19 girls, 19 boys). Auditory attention was measured by recording looking time towards a visual stimulus as infants were simultaneously presented with auditory tokens (see Figure 2). In a subsequent test phase of eight trials (i.e., four alternating and four non-alternating trials), discrimination was assumed if infants looked longer at ‘alternating’ trials (i.e., Alt trials), which contained two stimuli types, compared to either type of ‘non-alternating’ trials (i.e., Non-Alt trials), which contained only one type Both Alt and Non-Alt trials each contained four tokens. Each session began with two musical trials, one presented on each side, to allow infants to practice one head-turn to each side before the actual test phase began. The test phase consisted of 16 trials divided into two blocks (in each of which the two lists of each type of stimulus were presented twice). Children received a small gift at each testing time point, and caregivers were given £60 (i.e., £10 during for each of the first three visits and £30 at the end of the study)
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