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Early Development of Sound Processing: How does a prenatal bilingual environment impact the newborn’s language encoding?
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Poster C103 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Natàlia Gorina-Careta1,2,3, Sonia Arenillas-Alcón1,2,3, Marta Puertollano1,2,3, Alejandro Mondéjar-Segovia1,2, Siham Ijjou-Kadiri1,2, Jordi Costa-Faidella1,2, M.Dolores Gómez-Roig3,4, Carles Escera1,2,3; 1Brainlab – Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, University of Barcelona, 2Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, 3Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu (IRSJD), SJD Barcelona Children's Hospital, 4BCNatal, Barcelona Center for Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine, SJD Barcelona Children's Hospital and Hospital Clínic
The trajectory of language acquisition has been extensively characterized and is dependent on perceptual and cognitive abilities, whose developmental pathway starts before birth through prenatal experience with auditory and speech information. Several studies have demonstrated that even fetal hearing experiences shape the infants’ musical and linguistic preferences and that they are able to recognize the voice of their mother or even prefer their native language. 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 the third trimester of pregnancy could modulate the neonate's ability to encode speech sounds. For this purpose, we recorded the frequency-following response (FFR), an auditory evoked potential elicited to complex sounds, in a sample of 131 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 (53 exposed to a monolingual fetal acoustic environment; 78 bilingual-exposed). The FFR was recorded to an /oa/ stimulus and quantified as the spectral amplitude and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the stimulus fundamental frequency (F0). Analyses disclosed that monolingual-exposed newborns exhibited larger SNR at F0 as compared to the bilingual group, as well as significantly greater spectral amplitudes to the vowels formant structure. Our results suggest that prenatal language experience has a modulatory effect on the neural responses at birth, and specifically, that monolingual fetal environment generates a less variable background for the neonates to encode and process speech sounds. 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 the exposure of the fetus to a single language would produce more robust and larger amplitude responses at certain specific frequencies, bilingually exposed newborn’s auditory system shows a major sensitivity to a wider range of frequencies without generating a particularly strong response at any of them.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Speech Perception