Researchers found that prenatal exposure to maternal language influences neonatal neural encoding of speech sounds, with bilingual exposure enhancing sensitivity to a broader range of frequencies. This suggests early linguistic environments shape auditory processing capabilities from birth.
By Pooja Toshniwal PahariaMay 23 2024Reviewed by Susha Cheriyedath, M.Sc. In a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience , researchers explored the effect of maternal language on fetal speech perception.
About the study In the current neural encoding study, researchers investigated the impact of prenatal language exposure on neonatal language and speech-encoding abilities. The team excluded individuals with high-risk pregnancies, obstetric diseases, and hearing impairment risk factors. They investigated the neonatal frequency-following response to a two-vowel stimulus to assess speech encoding in 29 healthy neonates exposed to monolingual or multilingual settings in the last trimester of pregnancy. They studied the FFR reflecting the complex spectrotemporal dynamics for its capacity to encode voice pitch and vocalic formant structure data.
Results Bilingual mothers spoke most languages except Spanish, including English, Arabic, German, Galician, Italian, Guaraní, Portuguese, and Romanian. Monolingual mothers exposed their newborns to Catalan or Spanish languages . Neonates from multilingual mothers had a lower spectral signal-to-noise ratio . Monolingually exposed neonates showed higher spectral amplitude and SNR at F1.
Speech Anatomy Brain Frequency Hearing Language Neuroscience Pregnancy
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