A recent study revealed that a mother's voice strengthens a baby’s speech development.
To note, fetuses start hearing around 24 weeks into pregnancy, and by the final trimester, they’re already listening to their mother’s conversations.
Another study discovered that this early exposure plays an essential role in developing Broca's area, brain pathways essential for language.
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical School studied 46 premature babies who were born over eight weeks early and hospitalized in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs).
They randomly selected half of the infants to listen to recordings of their mothers reading a chapter from Paddington Bear for 160 minutes each night.
MRI scans found those babies showed substantial development in the left arcuate fasciculus, a brain region involved in understanding language.
Lead researcher Dr. Katherine Travis stated, “This is the first causal evidence that speech experience contributes to brain development at this very young age.”
Furthermore, she underscored that NICU environments often lack the natural speech exposure that full-term fetuses receive.
Even with short exposure periods, the voice recordings showed notable effects, according to a neonatologist at Stanford Dr. Melissa Scala.
Melissa further said, “In spite of that, we were seeing very measurable differences in their language tracts.”
She added, “It’s powerful that something fairly small seems to make a big difference.”
