Among preterm newborns, greater exposure to the mother’s voice after birth appeared to speed up the maturation of a key language-related brain circuit, in a small clinical trial conducted by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine, Burke Neurological Institute and Stanford Medicine. The finding provides direct experimental support for the idea that a mother’s voice promotes her child’s early language-related brain development. It also hints that boosting exposure to maternal speech might ameliorate the language development delays often seen among children born prematurely.
The study, published Oct. 14 in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, included 46 preterm infants who were born at just 24 to 31 weeks gestational age. Half received routine exposure to the mother’s voice, while the other half had routine exposure augmented with multiple daily audio recordings of the mother’s voice. Later MRI scans of the infants’ brains suggested significantly greater maturation in the left arcuate fasciculus, a brain circuit known to be involved in speech and language processing.
