Do pre-term babies cry differently than full-term babies?

A new study conducted by a team of researchers at Penn State, led by Michael Robb, professor of communication sciences and disorders, compared the acoustic features of cries collected from pre-term babies to the cries of full-term babies and found that noise differences resolved when the babies were age corrected. The team’s findings contradict prior beliefs in the field that pre-term babies’ noisier cries may indicate an increased risk of a negative developmental outcome compared to full-term babies.