Stanford study finds mom's voice may help brains of premature babies process language

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- For Kristine Atom and her son Kieran, afternoon time often starts with reading. But the sound of Mom's voice has already done more than spark his imagination. It may have helped develop it.

"My oldest child was actually also premature," Atom said. "So this is our second premature baby and was in the NICU for I think basically up until his due date."

Over those 10 weeks, she read to Kieran in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Why was that so valuable? Stanford researcher Dr. Melissa Scala and her colleagues believe they have an answer from a newly released clinical trial at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

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The team recorded mothers of premature infants reading from the classic children's book, Paddington Bear. Dr. Scala says the goal was to play the mom's voices for the premature infants several hours a night, to reproduce the same experience unborn infants normally get during the final months in their mother's womb.

"We know that babies can hear from about 24 weeks of gestation, so it's interesting that this predates when the baby is actually born," Dr. Scala said.

That's when unborn babies perform a kind of neurological eavesdropping that babies born prematurely might miss out on.

Several years ago, ABC7 News profiled a separate study at Stanford that helped document the powerful relationship that unborn infants develop to their mother's voice over others.

Dr. Scala and her colleagues also suspected that same relationship might be involved in neural development.

"Actually, it's interesting. A baby who's born full-term prefers their mother, their mother's voice to other female voices and the language of their parents to other languages," she said.

To test the physical factors behind that difference, the team used MRI scans to compare the brains of the babies who'd been read to against a control group. They found evidence of increased neural development in an area associated with processing language.

"And we were amazed to see the strength of the effect that we got," she says.

Dr. Scala and her colleagues hope to validate the findings with a larger test group and potentially infants with more severe health problems.

While Atom and her son weren't part of the study, the family believes the evidence is already pointing towards a resource that all families of premature infants should be able to take advantage of. The sound of Mom's voice.

"Yes, I think it's super important to provide that, both because of the stress of the whole family under as well as a benefit for the babies and the family as a whole," Atom said.