Department of Psychology, Child Study Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.
Department of Psychology, Child Study Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2019 Jan;122:11-19. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.12.003. Epub 2018 Dec 5.
In addition to semantic content, human speech carries paralinguistic information that conveys important social cues such as a speaker's identity. For young children, their own mothers' voice is one of the most salient vocal inputs in their daily environment. Indeed, qualities of mothers' voices are shown to contribute to children's social development. Our knowledge of how the mother's voice is processed at the neural level, however, is limited. This study investigated whether the voice of a mother modulates activation in the network of regions activated by the human voice in young children differently than the voice of an unfamiliar mother. We collected fMRI data from 32 typically developing 7- and 8-year-olds as they listened to natural speech produced by their mother and another child's mother. We used emotionally-varied natural speech stimuli to approximate the range of children's day-to-day experience. We individually-defined functional ROIs in children's voice-sensitive neural network and then independently investigated the extent to which activation in these regions is modulated by speaker identity. The bilateral posterior auditory cortex, superior temporal gyrus (STG), and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) exhibit enhanced activation in response to the voice of one's own mother versus that of an unfamiliar mother. The findings indicate that children process the voice of their own mother uniquely, and pave the way for future studies of how social information processing contributes to the trajectory of child social development.
除了语义内容外，人类的言语还传递着非言语信息，这些信息传达了重要的社会线索，如说话者的身份。对于幼儿来说，母亲的声音是他们日常生活中最突出的声音输入之一。事实上，母亲声音的特质被证明有助于儿童的社会发展。然而，我们对母亲的声音在神经水平上是如何被处理的知之甚少。本研究旨在探讨母亲的声音是否与陌生母亲的声音不同，从而调节年轻儿童对人类声音激活网络的激活。我们从 32 名正常发育的 7 至 8 岁儿童那里收集了 fMRI 数据，当他们听母亲和另一个孩子的母亲说自然语言时，这些数据被记录下来。我们使用情感多样化的自然语言刺激来近似儿童日常生活的范围。我们在儿童语音敏感神经网络中单独定义了功能 ROI，然后独立研究这些区域的激活程度是否受到说话者身份的调节。双侧后听觉皮层、颞上回（STG）和额下回（IFG）在对自己母亲声音的反应中表现出增强的激活，而对陌生母亲声音的反应则没有。这些发现表明，儿童对自己母亲的声音有独特的处理方式，为未来研究社会信息处理如何促进儿童社会发展轨迹奠定了基础。
