How do children respond to a mother's voice?

© 2022 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

A mother'south voice has special power. It can provide comfort — and improve outcomes — for babies hospitalized in the NICU. It can shape the mode infants process language in the brain. And information technology tin aid children cope with pain and stress.

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What happens when a baby hears its mother'south vox?

The story begins before nascence.

By the final trimester of pregnancy, babies can hear their mothers talking, and they react to what they hear. They wiggle. They motion. Their heart rates modify.

Moreover, these babies can tell the difference between the voices of their mothers and the voices of strangers. They can even distinguish betwixt their parents' native language and a foreign tongue (Carvalho et al 2019).

So newborns aren't clueless near voices. They've already had experiences with "listening in."

And as children grow older, they continue to show a bias for tuning into maternal talk, and they may experience a diversity of benefits from listening to mom. Here are the highlights.

Newborns prefer their mothers' voices

Equally I explain in my article almost the social world of newborns, young infants — just a few days onetime — can identify their mothers' voices. And they seem to adopt mom'south voice to the voices of other women.

For example, in one classic study, newborns listened to voices played over a loudspeaker, and their interest waxed and waned depending on whom they heard. When information technology was the voice of their own mother, they were more than attentive. They spent more than fourth dimension turning their heads in the direction of the loudspeaker (east.thou., DeCasper AJ and Fifer 1980).

Listening to a mother's voice tin meliorate outcomes among hospitalized newborns

When babies are born preterm, they are at higher risk for medical problems. So many preterm infants finish up spending fourth dimension in neonatal intensive care units, and medical providers are always looking for ways to assistance these babies thrive.

One safe bet? Exposing babies to their mothers' voices. As researchers note in a recent review of the testify, listening to mom may increment a preterm babe's autonomic stability, and promote healthy weight gain (Williamson and McGrath 20219).

I oasis't institute whatsoever similar research regarding health outcomes in full-term babies. But I've seen studies suggesting that maternal voices can assist all sorts of hospitalized infants — preterm and full-term — cope with the pain of medical procedures.

For instance, in recent experiments, researchers found that babies showed less intense distressed responses to painful procedures (like blood draws) when they were allowed to listen to their mothers talking (Chen et al 2021; Azarmnejad et al 2017).

A mother's voice can also accept special effects on language processing

Parents often adopt a distinctive song annals when speaking to babies. Their voices become more than musical, more exaggerated in tone. They speak at a slower stride, and repeat sure fundamental words.

This "infant-directed oral communication" captures a infant's attention, and it helps us convey our emotions. Information technology may even accelerate the stride at which infants learn language. Read more well-nigh it in my article, "Baby Talk 101: How babe-directed spoken communication helps babies learn language."

But babies hear infant-directed speech communication from many sources, including friendly strangers. Is in that location anything distinctive — anything "extra" — nearly a mother'southward infant-directed speech?

It seems so. If you compare the effects of a mother'due south voice with the effects of an unfamiliar adult female's vocalism, babies don't respond the same mode — even if both individuals are using "baby-directed speech," and maxim exactly the same words.

For example, in a recent study, researchers used brain imaging technology (near infrared spectroscopy) to see how babe brains process the speech sounds they hear.

Information technology's a painless process. Each infant — a newborn — wore a little electrode cap. And so the babe heard a series of audio recordings.

All of the recordings featured a woman talking in the "infant-directed" style, and reading from a standard script. But the identity of the woman varied from trial to trial. Sometimes it was a stranger. On other occasions, it was the baby's own mother. And information technology fabricated a difference.

When newborns listened to their own mothers (every bit opposed to strangers), they experienced heightened activeness in the left and right frontotemporal networks — encephalon networks that connect areas associated with linguistic communication and voice processing (Uchida-Ota et al 2019).

Does this mean that babies are more likely to learn words if they hear them spoken past their ain mothers?

Some other experiment supports this idea.

Researchers invented some nonsense words, words that no child would take ever heard before. So they provided two-year-olds with opportunities to learn these fanciful terms.

In some trials, the children were introduced to a new discussion by their ain mother. In other trials, the children heard a word spoken by a friendly, just unfamiliar, adult female.

What was the outcome? The toddlers learned new words more than easily when they heard the words spoken past mom.

It was true in the context of live interactions (where the children could see and interact with the women). It was also true when kids were limited to hearing voices lone (van Rooijen et al 2019).

A female parent's voice continues to accept an affect throughout babyhood

So far, we've been talking nigh babies. But at that place's prove that older children, too, respond in distinctive ways to a mother's vocalisation.

For instance, in i written report, researchers presented seven- and eight-twelvemonth-olds with the pre-recorded voices of different women, including the children's own mothers.

The kids were asked the rate the intensity of the emotions they heard, and their answers varied: Kids were more likely to rate their own mothers' voices equally being more intensely aroused or happy (Stoop et al 2020).

It seems they were reading things into their mother's voices that they didn't find in the voices of strangers.

Then we've got the evidence from another brain imaging study — this fourth dimension using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

Daniel Abrams and his colleagues scanned the brains of 24 healthy schoolhouse children equally the kids listened to audio recordings — playbacks of unlike women repeating nonsense words.

The audio clips were very brief, some lasting less than a second. Merely the children easily identified the voices of their ain mothers, and when they heard their own mothers, their brains switched into high gear.

Compared with reactions to non-maternal voices, the children's brains showed greater date in a wide swath of the encephalon, including brain regions specializing in auditory processing, emotion processing, advantage processing, confront-processing, and self-reflection.

Information technology revealed a heightened sensitivity for maternal voices,  and there was a link with social advice skills: The most socially savvy children didn't but show high levels of brain activeness in response to their own mother's voices. They also experienced greater connectivity between the brain regions in question.

In effect, the researchers could look at brain scans and infer which kids had the strongest social communication skills. Kids with the virtually "mother-biased" brain activeness were the well-nigh socially skillful (Abrams et al 2016).

What else? A mother'due south vox can lower stress hormone levels, and trigger a surge of oxytocin.

To see what I mean, consider this experiment led past Leslie Seltzer. Her enquiry team asked a group of young girls—aged vii to 12—to perform a stressful academic task in front of a live audience.

It's the sort of thing that makes cortisol levels rise, and that's normal. But what's not so healthy is when a child continues to feel high cortisol levels afterward the stressful event has passed. Ideally, we want to run into kids snap back to their pre-stressor status quo.

So Selzer'south squad wanted to see if mothers could facilitate the stress recovery process, and they tested for this by randomly assigning each girl to experience one of three, post-stressor conditions:

• the control condition, in which a girl would lookout a "neutral " picture show (i.e., i that was neither stressful nor soothing) for 75 minutes;

• the straight contact condition, in which a girl would interact with her female parent for xv minutes, face-to-face, and so spend an additional 60 minutes watching the neutral movie; or

• the vocalisation-just condition, in which a girl would talk to her mother on the telephone for 15 minutes, and and then watch hr of that movie.

The researchers monitored changes in the girls' hormonal levels throughout, focusing on cortisol (the stress hormone) and oxytocin. Oxtocin is a hormone that promotes feelings of social connectedness. It likewise helps calm us downward.

What patterns did the researchers run across?

For all girls, there was a sharp spike in cortisol levels immediately after their public operation.

Only the girls who got to spend time with their moms—either in person or on the phone—experienced the fastest recovery. Their cortisol levels returned to baseline inside 30 minutes. And their oxytocin levels got a boost that lasted for at least one hour.

The girls who didn't interact with their mothers at all? Their cortisol levels continued to rise after the stress test. And they didn't experience any boost in oxytocin.

So mothers delivered some pretty dramatic benefits to their children, and they were capable of doing so without fifty-fifty being physically present. They could meliorate their children'south stress response by using their voices lonely.

Are mothers the only people who tin produce these effects?

Surely non. Mothers' voices affect children considering mothers play such an important part in children'due south lives. When other individuals play important roles, they, as well, may have an influence.

Consider, for example, what happens to you, as an adult, when y'all talk with a friend.

A friendly talk lifts your mood. It makes you experience more socially-connected and secure.

And — just as we saw in the case of Leslie Seltzer'southward experiment on young girls — your chat may trigger measurable changes in your brain chemistry.

In experiments on adults, people who engaged in conversations with friends experienced immediate reductions in cortisol. They also experienced a surge of oxytocin (Djalovsky et al 2021).

And so while there may exist a kind of magic in a mother's vocalisation, it isn't an exclusive form of magic. Nosotros're probably affected by the voices of any people who are nearly and dear to united states, in i way or some other.

Still, it's undeniable that mothers are a very big deal. For nigh babies, they represent the first, most fundamental attachment effigy in their immature lives. As nosotros've noted, information technology starts fifty-fifty earlier birth.

And the nature of this key relationship helps set the pattern for other relationships.  When babies feel securely attached to their mothers, information technology bodes well for their ability to form healthy attachments to others. When babies aren't securely attached, they may struggle.

Which brings me to my last point: The furnishings of a female parent's vocalisation aren't e'er good.

Children — even babies — can detect stress and acrimony in our voices. And that tin can have adverse consequences. For instance, if a child is exposed to frequent conflict — overhearing angry arguments — it could lead to developmental changes in the stress response system.

And so mothers (and other caregivers) demand to be aware of the negative affect our voices tin can have.

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More reading

To learn more about the furnishings of warm, positive social interactions on children, check out these Parenting Science articles:

• Secure attachment relationships protect children from stress
• Oxytocin affects social bonds and our responses to toxic stress
• Positive parenting tips: Getting better results through humor, empathy, and diplomacy

For advice about coping with stress, come across my articles:

• Stress in babies: How to go along babies calm, happy, and emotionally healthy
• Parenting Stress: 12 evidence-based tips for making life meliorate

And for insights into the furnishings that our negative emotions can have on children, encounter these articles:

• Can babies sense stress in others? Yeah, they can!
• Can babies tell when parents are fighting?
• Treating postpartum depression benefits babies

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References

Abrams et al 2016. Neural circuits underlying female parent's phonation perception predict social communication abilities in children. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 113(22):6295-300.

Azarmnejad E, Sarhangi F, Javadi Thou, Rejeh N, Amirsalari S, Tadrisi SD. 2017. The effectiveness of familiar auditory stimulus on hospitalized neonates' physiologic responses to procedural pain. Int J Nurs Pract. 23(3)

Beauchemin M, González-Frankenberger B, Tremblay J, Vannasing P, Martínez-Montes E, Belin P, Béland R, Francoeur D, Carceller AM, Wallois F, Lassonde M. 2011. Mother and stranger: an electrophysiological written report of voice processing in newborns. Cereb Cortex. 21(8):1705-11

Carvalho ME, Justo JMRM; Gratier Grand and Rodrigues H. 2019. The Impact of Maternal Voice on the Fetus: A Systematic Review. Current Women`due south Health Reviews 15(three): 196-206.

Chen Y, Li Y, Lord's day J, Han D, Feng S, Zhang Ten. 2021. The Effect of Maternal Vox on Venipuncture Induced Pain in Neonates: A Randomized Study. Pain Manag Nurs. S1524-9042(21)00015-12

Djalovski A, Kinreich S, Zagoory-Sharon O, and Feldman R. 2021. Social dialogue triggers biobehavioral synchrony of partners' endocrine response via sexual activity-specific, hormone-specific, attachment-specific mechanisms.  Sci Rep. 11(one):12421.

Lang A, Ott P, Del Giudice R, Schabus M. 2020. Memory Traces Formed in Utero-Newborns' Autonomic and Neuronal Responses to Prenatal Stimuli and the Maternal Vocalization. Encephalon Sci. 10(11):837.

Selzter LJ, Ziegler TE, and Pollack SD. 2010. Social vocalizations tin can release oxytocin in humans. Proc Biol Sci. 277(1694):2661-6.

Stoop TB, Moriarty PM, Wolf R, Gilmore RO, Perez-Edgar One thousand, Scherf KS, Vigeant MC, Cole PM. 2020. I know that voice! Mothers' voices influence children'southward perceptions of emotional intensity.  J Exp Child Psychol. 2022 November;199:104907.

van Rooijen R, Bekkers E, and Junge C. 2019. Beneficial effects of the mother's phonation on infants' novel word learning Infancy. 24(six):838-856

Williamson S and McGrath JM. 2019. What Are the Effects of the Maternal Voice on Preterm Infants in the NICU?  Adv Neonatal Care. 19(4):294-310.

Content terminal modified 8/2021

title image of baby staring at mother while she talks on the phone past Galina Zhigalova / istock

image of infant in NICU past istock mvaligursky / istock

image of mother gazing in her baby'south optics, on bed, by Prostock Studio / istock

image of young girl listening with ear phones, eyes closed, by globalmoments / istock

prototype of footling boy cheerfully talking to his father by Treetree2016 / shutterstock

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