Professor N Reissland n.n.reissland@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Do fetuses move their lips to the sound that they hear? An observational feasibility study on auditory stimulation in the womb
Reissland, N.; Francis, B.; Buttanshaw, L.; Austen, J.M.; Reid, V.
Authors
B. Francis
L. Buttanshaw
Joseph Austen j.m.austen@durham.ac.uk
PGR Student Doctor of Philosophy
V. Reid
Abstract
Background: We investigate in this feasibility study whether specific lip movements increase prenatally when hearing a particular sound. We hypothesised that fetuses would produce more mouth movements resembling those required to make the sound stimulus they heard (i.e. mouth stretch) compared with a no-sound control group who heard no specific auditory stimuli. Secondly, we predicted that fetuses hearing the sound would produce a similar number of mouth movements unrelated to the sound heard (ie lip pucker) as the no-sound group of fetuses. Methods: In an observational feasibility study, 17 fetuses were scanned twice at 32 and 36 weeks gestation, and two different types of mouth movements recorded. Three fetuses received an auditory stimulus, and 14 did not. A generalised mixed effects loglinear model was used to determine statistical significance. Results: Fetuses in the sound group performed one specific mouth movement (mouth stretch) significantly more frequently than fetuses in the no-sound group. A significant interaction between group and gestational age indicates that there was differential change in this specific movement as age increases (X 2= 7.58 on 1 df , p = .006), with the no sound group showing a decline of 76% between 32 weeks and 36 weeks (p < .001), whereas the sound group showed no significant change over time( p=0.41) . There was no significant difference between the sound group and no sound group in the frequency of lip puckering - the second, unrelated mouth movement (p=0.35). Conclusions: These results suggest that a sound stimulus is associated with an increase in specific, rather than general, mouth movements. The results are informative for the development of infant speech, and potentially could also lead to a diagnostic test for deafness in utero. More research is needed to replicate this research with a randomised design and with a range of different auditory stimuli which would be produced with different mouth movements, such as "o" which would be seen as pursed lips.
Citation
Reissland, N., Francis, B., Buttanshaw, L., Austen, J., & Reid, V. (2016). Do fetuses move their lips to the sound that they hear? An observational feasibility study on auditory stimulation in the womb. Pilot and Feasibility Studies, 2(1), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40814-016-0053-3
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Feb 19, 2016 |
Online Publication Date | Mar 1, 2016 |
Publication Date | Mar 1, 2016 |
Deposit Date | Feb 23, 2015 |
Publicly Available Date | Feb 23, 2016 |
Journal | Pilot and Feasibility Studies |
Publisher | BioMed Central |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 2 |
Issue | 1 |
Article Number | 14 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1186/s40814-016-0053-3 |
Keywords | Prenatal stimulation, Fetal hearing, Fetal mouth movement |
Files
Accepted Journal Article
(903 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
© 2016 Reissland et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver
(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Published Journal Article
(491 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
You might also like
Flavor Sensing in Utero and Emerging Discriminative Behaviours in the Human Fetus
(2022)
Journal Article
The effects of induced optical blur on visual search performance and training
(2021)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search