Prenatal daily musical exposure is associated with enhanced neural representation of speech fundamental frequency: Evidence from neonatal frequency-following responses

Fetal hearing experiences shape the linguistic and musical preferences of neonates. From the very first moment after birth, newborns prefer their native language, recognize their mother's voice, and show a greater responsiveness to lullabies presented during pregnancy. Yet, the neural underpinnings of this experience inducing plasticity have remained elusive. Here we recorded the frequency-following response (FFR), an auditory evoked potential elicited to periodic complex sounds, to show that prenatal music exposure is associated to enhanced neural encoding of speech stimuli periodicity, which relates to the perceptual experience of pitch. FFRs were recorded in a sample of 60 healthy neonates born at term and aged 12–72 hours. The sample was divided into two groups according to their prenatal musical exposure (29 daily musically exposed; 31 not-daily musically exposed). Prenatal exposure was assessed retrospectively by a questionnaire in which mothers reported how often they sang or listened to music through loudspeakers during the last trimester of pregnancy. The FFR was recorded to either a /da/ or an /oa/ speech-syllable stimulus. Analyses were centered on stimuli sections of identical duration (113 ms) and fundamental frequency (F₀ = 113 Hz). Neural encoding of stimuli periodicity was quantified as the FFR spectral amplitude at the stimulus F₀. Data revealed that newborns exposed daily to music exhibit larger spectral amplitudes at F₀ as compared to not-daily musically-exposed newborns, regardless of the eliciting stimulus. Our results suggest that prenatal music exposure facilitates the tuning to human speech fundamental frequency, which may support early language processing and acquisition.

Research Highlights

• Frequency-following responses to speech were collected from a sample of neonates prenatally exposed to music daily and compared to neonates not-daily exposed to music.
• Neonates who experienced daily prenatal music exposure exhibit enhanced frequency-following responses to the periodicity of speech sounds.
• Prenatal music exposure is associated with a fine-tuned encoding of human speech fundamental frequency, which may facilitate early language processing and acquisition.

     

Table talk: inviting students to share the feast

This account describes part of the first morning of the AFT accredited South Yorkshire Foundation Course in Family Therapy and Systemic Practice. The course committee members join together in a reflective conversation about the course. We share with the students our ‘kitchen table’ discussions, the history of our involvement, and how it has affected our lives. We aim to introduce social constructionist practice in which we present the context of the course and address the power relationships in the room by being transparent about our own experiences. We hope to create an atmosphere in which learning can flourish.     

Estimating Age-Based Developmental Trajectories Using Latent Change Score Models Based on Measurement Occasion

Abstract

Accelerated longitudinal designs (ALDs) are designs in which participants from different cohorts provide repeated measures covering a fraction of the time range of the study. ALDs allow researchers to study developmental processes spanning long periods within a relatively shorter time framework. The common trajectory is studied by aggregating the information provided by the different cohorts. Latent change score (LCS) models provide a powerful analytical framework to analyze data from ALDs. With developmental data, LCS models can be specified using measurement occasion as the time metric. This provides a number of benefits, but has an important limitation: It makes it not possible to characterize the longitudinal changes as a function of a developmental process such as age or biological maturation. To overcome this limitation, we propose an extension of an occasion-based LCS model that includes age differences at the first measurement occasion. We conducted a Monte Carlo study and compared the results of including different transformations of the age variable. Our results indicate that some of the proposed transformations resulted in accurate expectations for the studied process across all the ages in the study, and excellent model fit. We discuss these results and provide the R code for our analysis.     

The Resilient Organisation: A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Communication on Team Diversity and Team Performance

The Input-Process-Output framework is adopted to examine the impact of diversity attributes (the input) on communication (the process) and their influence on performance (the output), to understand the internal group/team working mechanisms of organisational resilience. A meta-analysis of 174 correlations from 35 empirical studies undertaken over 35 years (1982–2017) showed that members of a team who have different experiences are more likely to share information and communicate openly when they deal with a task that requires collaboration outside the team. This supports the view that organisations are more resilient by being more closely connected with the external environment. Differences in social categories tend to favour openness of communication, especially in the case of age diversity and race/ethnicity diversity. An increase in openness of communication is likely to enhance team performance, particularly for small and medium-sized teams operating in manufacturing industries, while frequency of communication can be beneficial for both large and medium-sized teams working in the high technology industry. The positive workings of these associations form the resilient organisation.