Author: Borders
Published: 2024/05/22
Post type: Experimental study – Peer Reviewed: Yeah
Content: Summary – Introduction – Major – Related
Synopsis: Newborns exposed to multiple languages in utero show increased sensitivity to various sound tones. Exposure to bilingual or monolingual maternal speech during pregnancy affects the neurophysiological encoding of speech sounds in newborns differently. At birth, newborns of bilingual mothers appear more sensitive to a broader range of acoustic speech variations, while newborns of monolingual mothers appear to be more selectively attuned to the only language in which they have been immersed.
Introduction
It is well established that babies in the womb hear and learn speech, at least in the third trimester. For example, it has been shown that newborns already prefer their mother’s voice, recognize a story they have been told repeatedly while in the womb, and distinguish their mother’s native language.
Main summary
What was not known until now was how developing fetuses learn speech when their mother speaks to them in a mixture of languages. However, this is common: there are 3.3 billion bilingual people (43% of the population) worldwide, and in many countries, bilingualism or multilingualism is the norm.
“Here we show that exposure to monolingual or bilingual speech has different effects at birth on the ‘neural coding’ of voice pitch and vowel sounds: that is, how the fetus has initially learned information about these aspects of speech.” said Dr. Natàlia Gorina-Careta, a researcher at the Institute of Neurosciences at the University of Barcelona and joint first author of a new study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
“At birth, newborns of bilingual mothers appear more sensitive to a broader range of acoustic speech variations, while newborns of monolingual mothers appear to be more selectively attuned to the only language in which they have been immersed.”
Study carried out in polyglot Catalonia
Gorina-Careta and her colleagues conducted their study in Catalonia, where 12% of the population regularly uses both Catalan and Spanish. They recruited as volunteers the mothers of 131 newborns aged one to three days (including two sets of twins) at the Sant Joan de Déu Children’s Hospital in Barcelona.
Of these mothers, 41% responded in a questionnaire that they spoke exclusively Catalan (9%) or Spanish (91%) during pregnancy, even when speaking with their growing belly. The other 59% had spoken in two languages (at least 20% of the time in the second language): Spanish and Catalan or a combination of one of them with languages such as Arabic, English, Romanian or Portuguese.
“Languages vary in temporal aspects of speech, such as rhythm and stress, but also in pitch and phonetic information. This means that fetuses of bilingual mothers are expected to be immersed in a more complex acoustic environment than those of bilingual mothers. monolingual mothers,” said Dr. Carles Escera, a professor at the same institute and one of the two corresponding authors.
The researchers placed electrodes on the babies’ foreheads to measure a particular type of electrophysiological brain response – the “frequency-following response” (FFR) – to the repeated playback of a carefully selected, 250-millisecond-long, compound sound stimulus. of four stages: the vowel /o/, a transition, the vowel /a/ in a constant tone and /a/ rising in pitch.
/oa/ sound
“The contrasting vowels /o/ and /a/ belong to the phonetic repertoire of both Spanish and Catalan, which is why we chose them,” explained joint first author Dr. Sonia Arenillas-Alcón of the same institute.
“Low-frequency sounds, like these vowels, also transmit reasonably well through the uterus, unlike mid- and high-frequency sounds that reach the fetus in a degraded and attenuated form.”
FFR measures how precisely the action spikes produced by neurons in the auditory cortex and brainstem mimic the sound wave characteristics of the stimulus. A more distinctive FFR is evidence that the brain has been trained more effectively to pick up precisely that sound. For example, the FFR can be used as a measure of the degree of auditory learning, linguistic experience, and musical training.
The authors showed that the FFR for the reproduction of the /oa/ sound was more distinctive, that is, better defined and with a higher signal-to-noise ratio, in newborns of monolingual mothers than in newborns of bilingual mothers.
Possible compensation
These results suggest that the brains of fetuses of monolingual mothers had learned to become maximally sensitive to language tone. In contrast, the brains of fetuses of bilingual mothers appear to have become sensitive to a wider range of tone frequencies, but without generating the maximum response to any of them. Therefore, there may be a trade-off between efficiency versus selectivity in learning about pitch.
“Our data show that prenatal language exposure modulates the neural encoding of speech sounds measured at birth. These results emphasize the importance of prenatal language exposure for the encoding of speech sounds at birth and provide novel information about its effects,” Escera said.
Co-corresponding author Dr. Jordi Costa Faidella, associate professor at the same institute, warned:
“Based on our results, we cannot make any recommendations to multilingual parents. The sensitive period for language acquisition lasts long after birth and therefore the postnatal experience may overshadow the initial changes made in utero. Future research on “How a bilingual linguistic environment is modulated by sound encoding during the first years of life will shed more light on this topic.”
Similar topics of interest
Attribution/Source(s):
This peer-reviewed publication titled Bilingual exposure in utero affects newborns’ speech perception was chosen for publication by the editors of Disabled World due to its relevance to the disability community. While content may have been edited for style, clarity, or brevity, it was originally written by Borders and published on 05/22/2024. For more details or clarifications, you can contact Borders directly on frontiersin.org Disabled World makes no warranty or endorsement related to this article.
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Cite this page (APA): Borders. (2024, May 22). Bilingual exposure in utero affects newborns’ speech perception. Disabled world. Retrieved May 23, 2024 from www.disabled-world.com/disability/children/newborns-speech.php
Permanent link: Bilingual exposure in utero affects newborns’ speech perception: Newborns exposed to multiple languages in the uterus show increased sensitivity to various sound tones.
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