2019/08/22
Keio University
A research group including Researcher Mariko Uchida and Professor Yasuyo Minagawa from the Psychology Laboratory, Faculty of Letters, and the Baby Laboratory at Keio University; Assistant Professor Takeshi Arimitsu and Professor Takao Takahashi from the Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine, Keio University; and researchers from Chuo University and Tokyo Metropolitan University has found that listening to their mother's voice strengthens functional brain connectivity between the frontal and temporal regions in newborns aged 2-7 days. In particular, the anterior-posterior language circuits in the left hemisphere and the circuits in the right hemisphere involved in voice recognition—in other words, the circuits related to communication functions—were strengthened.
While it was previously known that parts of the language areas in the brain are activated in response to speech even in newborns, the connectivity of language circuits had not been confirmed. This study is the first in the world to report that the mother's voice—a sound frequently heard during the fetal period, as opposed to a stranger's voice—not only more strongly activates the language areas but also strengthens the connectivity of language circuits.
These findings are significant in that they show that the prefrontal cortex functions for speech processing in newborns, previously thought to be underdeveloped, are relatively mature, and they provide neuroscientific evidence that a specific caregiver's voice promotes the linguistic and social development of infants.
The results of this research are scheduled to be published in "Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience," and the online version was released on August 8, 2019.
For the full press release, please see below.