Preterm infant showed better object handling skills in a neonatal intensive care unit during silence than with a recorded female voice

Aim: This study compared whether preterm infants showed better tactile abilities during silence or when they heard a pre-recorded female voice at different intensities. Methods: We studied 74 preterm infants of 28-35 weeks post-conceptional age who were admitted to a French neonatal intensive care unit from 2014-2017. They were presented with wooden objects, one smooth and one angled, at various points during silence (n=26) or while listening to a female voice at +5 (n=24) or +15 decibels (n=24) inside their incubator. We compared the conditions to see if there was any difference in how the infants handled the objects and also compared familiar and unfamiliar objects. Results: The preterm infants showed better handling skills, and only displayed effective discrimination, during silence. We found that 27.1% of the infants exposed to female voices failed to get habituated to the object, compared to 7.7% in the silence condition (p < 0.05) and success during the voice conditions required more trials (6.1 versus 5.3) than the silence condition (p = 0.05). The different voice intensities made no difference. Conclusion: Being exposed to a female voice had a negative impact on preterm infants' tactile sensory learning, regardless of its intensit