Bosch, L. , Solé, J. & Teixidó, M.
University of Barcelona
Extracting word units from the input and detecting repetitions of these units in different contexts is a basic skill related to early vocabulary construction. This ability emerges around 7 months of age in normally-developing full-term infants. Prematurely born infants are at risk for neurocognitive deficits, language being one of the areas than is often compromised. Exploring the emergence of word segmentation abilities in this population can contribute to a better understanding of their delays in lexical development. Comparing data from highly and moderately premature infants can also be informative about the role of maturation and length of language exposure in the timing of the segmentation ability. Data from an ongoing research project involving healthy participants, varying in gestational age at birth (very preterm, moderately preterm and a full term control group), tested for monosyllabic word segmentation ability at 8 and 11 months age (corrected age for gestation in preterm groups, CA) will be presented. A behavioral task with exposure to natural language passages in the familiarization phase and word lists in the test was used. Results reveal that only the two groups of full term infants show clear evidence of word segmentation ability, both at 8 and 11 months of age, with a novelty preference response pattern in the test. Highly and moderately preterm groups failed in the task at 8 months (CA) and only the moderately preterm group at 11 months (CA) approached a significant novelty preference effect. Taken together these results suggest that preterm birth has a negative impact on the emergence of the segmentation ability, also affecting infants born closer to full term age but still immature in terms of brain networks and cortical circuitry development. The emergence of this ability seems to be guided more by neural maturation factors than length of language exposure.