Allô allô! Mom’s voice plays special role in activating newborn’s brain

Researchers applied electrodes to babies’ heads to analyze their brain activity.

Allô allô! Mom’s voice plays special role in activating newborn’s brain
Recordings within 24 hours of birth reveal brain parts that only react to her voice

From the December 15, 2010 Eureka news release

A mother’s voice will preferentially activate the parts of the brain responsible for language learning, say researchers from the University of Montreal and the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Centre. The research team made the discovery after performing electrical recordings on the infants within the 24 hours following their birth. The brain signals also revealed that while the infants did react to other women’s voices, these sounds only activated the voice recognition parts of the brains. “This is exciting research that proves for the first time that the newborn’s brain responds strongly to the mother’s voice and shows, scientifically speaking, that the mother’s voice is special to babies,” said lead researcher Dr. Maryse Lassonde of the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychology and the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Centre.

The research was published in Cerebral Cortex and received funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Canada Research Chairs programme.The full text of the article may be found here.