Pointing at communicative, cognitive, linguistic, and motor skills in preterm and full-term infants at 18 months

Preterm birth represents a risk for vulnerability across neurodevelopmental domains. However, its impact on early communication and cross-domain associations remains underexplored. This study compared preterm and full-term infants at 18 months on communicative, cognitive, linguistic, and motor abilities, and examined associations between pointing and these skills. Thirty-nine preterm and 28 full-term infants participated. Pointing (hand, index), vocal productions (vocalizations, babbling, words), and expression modalities (unimodal gestural, unimodal vocal, bimodal gestural-vocal) were elicited using the “decorated room” task and coded with ELAN. Cognitive, language (receptive, expressive), and motor (fine, gross) abilities were assessed with the BSID-III. Preterm infants produced fewer index points, babbling, and bimodal expressions, and showed lower scores across all BSID-III scales. Only in preterm infants, index pointing significantly correlated with developmental scores, particularly cognitive and fine-motor ones. Findings highlight interconnected cross-domain developmental trajectories in the preterm population, with index pointing as a key developmental marker at 18 months.