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In:Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages
Edited by Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla, Lucía Buil-Legaz, Raúl López-Penadés, Victor A. Sanchez-Azanza and Daniel Adrover-Roig
[Not in series 223] 2019
► pp. 75–90

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Word segmentation and mapping in early word learning

Differences between full term and moderately preterm infants

 | Universitat de Barcelona | Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu
 | Universitat de Barcelona
 | Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu | Neonatology Unit Hospital Sant Joan de Déu
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 11 June 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/z.223.05bos
Comparative study with infants differing in gestational age at birth, tested on a dual word segmentation and mapping task with natural language passages and visual cues to facilitate word extraction and word-referent association, two abilities linked to vocabulary building. Infants were tested at 9 months corrected age for gestation, with preterm infants having longer language experience than full-terms, but similar maturational age. Only full terms succeeded on the word mapping test. While visual cues were expected to facilitate word extraction, unsuccessful mapping is possibly related to the cognitive demands of the task, requiring simultaneous processes for the young learner. Differences in language development levels were also identified, suggesting a complex interplay of factors behind preterm infants’ early language learning skills.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Methodology
    • Participants
    • Materials
    • Procedure
    • Measures
  • Results
    • Familiarization phase
    • Test phase
    • BSID-III measures of cognitive and language development
  • Discussion
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
  • Appendix
References (38)
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