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Disentangling the effects of a bilingual fetal acoustic environment on neonatal neural sound encoding

Poster C23 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 7, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall

Natàlia Gorina-Careta^1,2, Marta Puertollano^1,2,3, Alejandro Mondéjar-Segovia^2,3, Sonia Arenillas-Alcón^1,2,3, Siham Ijjou-Kadiri^2,3, Maria Dolores Gómez-Roig^1,4, Carles Escera^1,2,3; ¹Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute, Esplugues de Llobregat (Barcelona, Spain), ²Brainlab – Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group. Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), ³Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), ⁴BCNatal – Barcelona Center for Maternal Fetal and Neonatal Medicine (Hospital Sant Joan de Déu and Hospital Clínic), University of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain).

Language experience shapes how auditory system processes sound from the first moments in life. Early childhood is the developmental window when learning has a maximal influence on neural function and learning a second language in early childhood is a driving factor of functional neuroplasticity. Even though the auditory system of newborns is not biased to the native language of their parents, exposure to specific language environment alters infants’ speech perception during the first year of life. Yet, several studies have demonstrated that even fetal hearing experiences shape the infants’ musical and linguistic preferences. As bilingualism, relative to a monolingual environment, has been demonstrated to enhance evoked responses to speech in children and adults, the present study sought to determine whether a bilingual environment during pregnancy modulates the newborn’s ability to processing sounds. To do so, the frequency-following response (FFR), an auditory evoked potential elicited to complex sounds, was recorded in a sample of 90 healthy term neonates during their first days of life. Newborns were divided into two groups according to their prenatal language exposure as reported by their mothers through a questionnaire (45 exposed to a bilingual fetal acoustic environment; 41 monolingual-exposed). The FFR was recorded to an /oa/ stimulus and quantified as the spectral amplitude and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the stimulus F0. Results revealed that neonates exposed to a monolingual environment exhibited larger SNR of the F0 as compared to the bilingual group, whilst no differences where observed on the spectral amplitude of the F0. These results suggest that prenatal language exposure modulates the neural responses to human speech at birth and, in particular, we observe that a fetal monolingual environment provides a more stable background for newborns to encode and process sounds. On the other hand, newborns exposed to a bilingual fetal environment, despite having a similar neural response as monolinguals to the presented stimulus, are also tracking other frequencies outside the fundamental frequency. Our results contribute to the current hypothesis that bilingual infants commence the process of language acquisition by separating languages from birth by demonstrating that, whilst a monolingual fetal environment provides a more stable background, bilingually exposed newborn’s auditory system is tracking a wider range of frequencies.

Topic Areas: Development, Multilingualism