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Fetal development of an articulatory motor pattern for native language production
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Poster E96 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Alejandra Hüsser1, Huw Swanborough1,2, Volker Dellwo1, András Jakab3, Alexis Hervais-Adelman1,2; 1University of Zurich, 2Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich, 3University Children’s Hospital Zurich
By 20 weeks gestational age, fetuses perceive the auditory environment outside the womb, a capability that substantially increases in sophistication during the third trimester of pregnancy. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the prenatal linguistic environment influences postnatal language comprehension, such as the discrimination of speech in the mother tongue from that in a foreign language or variations in pitch. Recent findings reveal that infants a few days after birth produce accented cries. Specifically, cries in native French and German newborns are marked by a distinct pitch contour that reflects the typically pitch accent of the environmental language. This suggests that articulatory patterns influenced by the auditory environment start to develop in utero, well before the production of any vocalisations. We hypothesize that in utero auditory experience contributes to the tuning of future articulatory-motor patterns, that may even support early articulatory skills. Fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a second line clinical tool for prenatal diagnostics after prenatal ultrasonography, and has become widely accepted as a safe tool for in utero assessment of brain development. More recent works have demonstrated the viability of fetal MRI for detecting brain activation for auditory stimuli as well as revealed how brain networks develop, offering a more direct assessment of prenatal language processing. The main objective of our study is therefore to directly map the fetal response to speech stimuli and characterize the auditory and sensorimotor coupling. Up to 25 expectant mothers carrying healthy singleton pregnancies will be recruited to participate in a study to examine fetal brain responses to auditory stimuli. Each mother's voice will be recorded articulating trisyllabic nonsense words which will undergo manipulation to produce falling, rising and flat pitch contours, and will be transposed in pitch to have a fundamental frequency resembling a male voice. A set of non-speech control stimuli (harmonic complexes with the fundamental frequency and pitch contours of the speech stimuli) and null events will be presented in a pseudo random order using a rapid event-related design (three five-minute blocks). Audio stimuli are presented transabdominally to the fetus via MR-compatible headphones. Fetal cerebral response will be recorded using EPI imaging at 3T. Fetal brain responses will be tested for differential responses to speech vs non-speech, maternal vs non-maternal speech and to different pitch contour. Further, functional connectivity of key areas in both hemispheres for expressive (inferior frontal) and receptive (superior temporal) language processing will be tested for differential connectivity during stimulus processing. Graph network analysis will allow to further interpret properties of network architecture related to fetal language processing. This study is a first step in refining our understanding of the developmental trajectory of cerebral language networks and to precise the role of auditory and sensorimotor interactions for the establishment of native accents and later language acquisition. We are currently piloting in adult participants to validate our task and optimize imaging parameters. The recruitment of pregnant women starts this summer, and we aim to have preliminary fetal data by fall 2023.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Speech Motor Control