Fetal reactions to recurrent maternal speech

doi:10.1016/0163-6383(94)90051-5

Infant Behavior and Development

Volume 17, Issue 2, April–June 1994, Pages 159-164

https://doi.org/10.1016/0163-6383(94)90051-5 Get rights and content

Abstract

Pregnant women recited a short child's rhyme, “the target”, aloud each day between the thirty third and thirty seventh weeks of their fetuses' gestation. Then their fetuses were stimulated with tape recordings of the target and a control rhyme. The target elicited a decrease in fetal heartrate whereas the control did not. Thus, fetuses' exposure to specific speech sounds can affect their subsequent reactions to those sounds. More generally, the result suggests that third trimester fetuses become familiar with recurrent, maternal speech sounds.

References (25)

A.J. DeCasper et al.
Prenatal maternal speech influences newborns' perception of speech sounds
Infant Behavior and Development
(1986)
A. Fernald et al.
Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese speech
Infant Behavior and Development
(1987)
J.-P. Lecanuet et al.
Fetal cardiac and motor responses to octave-band noises as a function of central frequency, intensity, and heartache variability
Early Human Development
(1988)
J.-P. Lecanuet et al.
Fetal responses to acoustic stimulation depend on heart rate variability pattern, stimulus intensity and repetition
Early Human Development
(1986)
J.G. Nijhuis et al.
Are there behavioral states in the human fetus?
Early Human Development
(1982)
D. Querleu et al.
Fetal hearing
European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology
(1988)
R. Abrams et al.
Transmission of sound and vibration to the fetus
S. Benzaquen et al.
The Intrauterine sound environment of the human fetus during labor
M.-C. Busnel et al.
And what of fetal audition?
R.P. Cooper et al.
Preference for infant directed speech in the first month after birth
Child Development
(1990)

R. Coopersmith et al.

Enhanced neural responses to familiar olfactory cues

Science

(1984)

A.J. DeCasper et al.

Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers' voices

Science

(1980)

Cited by (202)

Unveiling the development of human voice perception: Neurobiological mechanisms and pathophysiology
2024, Current Research in Neurobiology
The human voice is a critical stimulus for the auditory system that promotes social connection, informs the listener about identity and emotion, and acts as the carrier for spoken language. Research on voice processing in adults has informed our understanding of the unique status of the human voice in the mature auditory cortex and provided potential explanations for mechanisms that underly voice selectivity and identity processing. There is evidence that voice perception undergoes developmental change starting in infancy and extending through early adolescence. While even young infants recognize the voice of their mother, there is an apparent protracted course of development to reach adult-like selectivity for human voice over other sound categories and recognition of other talkers by voice. Gaps in the literature do not allow for an exact mapping of this trajectory or an adequate description of how voice processing and its neural underpinnings abilities evolve. This review provides a comprehensive account of developmental voice processing research published to date and discusses how this evidence fits with and contributes to current theoretical models proposed in the adult literature. We discuss how factors such as cognitive development, neural plasticity, perceptual narrowing, and language acquisition may contribute to the development of voice processing and its investigation in children. We also review evidence of voice processing abilities in premature birth, autism spectrum disorder, and phonagnosia to examine where and how deviations from the typical trajectory of development may manifest.
Bonding and Attachment with Baby in the Womb or in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: The Critical Role of Early Emotional Connections
2023, Critical Care Nursing Clinics of North America
Newborns’ neural processing of native vowels reveals directional asymmetries
2021, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Prenatal learning of speech rhythm and melody is well documented. Much less is known about the earliest acquisition of segmental speech categories. We tested whether newborn infants perceive native vowels, but not nonspeech sounds, through some existing (proto-)categories, and whether they do so more robustly for some vowels than for others. Sensory event-related potentials (ERP), and mismatch responses (MMR), were obtained from 104 neonates acquiring Czech. The ERPs elicited by vowels were larger than the ERPs to nonspeech sounds, and reflected the differences between the individual vowel categories. The MMRs to changes in vowels but not in nonspeech sounds revealed left-lateralized asymmetrical processing patterns: a change from a focal [a] to a nonfocal [ɛ], and the change from short [ɛ] to long [ɛ:] elicited more negative MMR responses than reverse changes. Contrary to predictions, we did not find evidence of a developmental advantage for vowel length contrasts (supposedly most readily available in utero) over vowel quality contrasts (supposedly less salient in utero). An explanation for these asymmetries in terms of differential degree of prior phonetic warping of speech sounds is proposed. Future studies with newborns with different language backgrounds should test whether the prenatal learning scenario proposed here is plausible.
The prenatal brain readiness for speech processing: A review on foetal development of auditory and primordial language networks
2021, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
Despite consolidated evidence for the prenatal ability to elaborate and respond to sounds and speech stimuli, the ontogenetic functional brain maturation of language responsiveness in the foetus is still poorly understood. Recent advances in in-vivo foetal neuroimaging have contributed to a finely detailed picture of the anatomo-functional hallmarks that define the prenatal neurodevelopment of auditory and language-related networks. Here, we first outline available evidence for the prenatal development of auditory and language-related brain structures and of their anatomical connections. Second, we focus on functional connectivity data showing the emergence of auditory and primordial language networks in the foetal brain. Third, we recapitulate functional neuroimaging studies assessing the prenatal readiness for sound processing, as a crucial prerequisite for the foetus to experientially respond to spoken language. In conclusion, we suggest that the state of the art has reached sufficient maturity to directly assess the neural mechanisms underlying the prenatal readiness for speech processing and to evaluate whether foetal neuromarkers can predict the postnatal development of language acquisition abilities and disabilities.
Infancy studies come of age: Jacques Mehler's influence on the importance of perinatal experience for early language learning
2021, Cognition
Citation Excerpt :
The notes were presented via a loudspeaker near the mother's abdomen. In a similar vein, DeCasper, Lecanuet, Busnel, Granier-Deferre, and Maugeais (1994) asked the mothers of 33- to 37-week-old fetuses to recite aloud a short nursery rhyme every day. At 37-weeks, the authors recorded cardiac changes in the fetuses when the familiar rhyme was presented vs. a novel rhyme (also read by the mother).
In this paper, we pay homage to Jacques Mehler's empirical and theoretical contributions to the field of infancy studies. We focus on studies of the ability of the human fetus and newborn to attend to, learn from, and remember aspects of the environment, in particular the linguistic environment, as a part of an essential dynamic system of early influence. We provide a selective review of Mehler's and others' studies that examined the perinatal period and helped to clarify the earliest skills and predilections that infants bring to the task of language learning. We then highlight findings on newborns' perceptual skills and biases that motivated a shift in researchers' focus to fetal learning to better understand the role of the maternal voice in guiding newborns' speech perception. Finally, we point to the inspiration drawn from these perinatal approaches to more full-scale empirical treatments of how prenatal experience and behavior have come to be recognized as essential underpinnings to the earliest mental architectures of human cognition.
Early acoustic experience alters genome-wide methylation in the auditory forebrain of songbird embryos
2021, Neuroscience Letters
Early exposure to salient cues can critically shape the development of social behaviors. For example, both oscine birds and humans can hear and learn to recognize familiar sounds in ovo and in utero and recognize them following hatching and birth, respectively. Here we demonstrate that different chronic acoustic playbacks alter genome-wide methylation of the auditory forebrain in late-stage zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) embryos. Within the same subjects, immediate early gene activation in response to acute con- or heterospecific song exposure is negatively correlated with methylation extent in response to repeated daily prior exposure to the same type of stimuli. Specifically, we report less relative global methylation following playbacks of conspecific songs and more methylation following playbacks of distantly-related heterospecific songs. These findings offer a neuroepigenomic mechanism for the ontogenetic impacts of early acoustic experiences in songbirds.

View all citing articles on Scopus

^☆: This work was supported by grant CIES 34410.360.80604 from the French Ministry of Exterior Relations to A.J.D., who was sponsored by P. Roubertoux, Universite Paris V, URA 1294 CNRS, Genetique, Neurogenetique et Comportement. There was also support from the Fulbright Program and the Research Council of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to AJD and from grant 30061, 13005 INSERM and 638 CNAMTS to M.-C.B. and C. Sureau. The authors wish to thank C. Sureau (Baudelocque Maternity CHU Cochin, Paris, France) and his staff for their valuable help. We are especially grateful to the mothers and their infants for making this research possible.

View full text

Fetal reactions to recurrent maternal speech☆

Abstract

Infant Behavior and Development

Infant Behavior and Development

Early Human Development

Early Human Development

Early Human Development

European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology

Transmission of sound and vibration to the fetus

The Intrauterine sound environment of the human fetus during labor

And what of fetal audition?

Preference for infant directed speech in the first month after birth

Child Development

Enhanced neural responses to familiar olfactory cues

Science

Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers' voices

Science