Background: Preterm birth occurs in up to 12% of births, and therefore affects a large number of newborns worldwide. It has been described in the literature, that early exposure to the extra-uterine environment due to premature birth can have various effects for an infant's neurodevelopment, and thus can affect aspects of development such as cognition and language. The aim of this Master's thesis is to assess whether the brain of preterm newborns, who were exposed to language earlier in their extra-uterine environment, show different cortical speech processing. In order to achieve this, we investigated functional brain activation in preterm- and fullterm newborns while listening to forward and backward (in time reversed) speech using fMRI. We hypothesized that early language exposure in the preterm infant would allow for different cortical processing of forward to backward speech in preterm infants compared to fullterm infants...