Article Review: Reactions of Maternal Voices in Infants - Essay Example

To do so, they had mother repeat a rhyme for four weeks beginning on their 33 week of gestation. Following the end of the rhyme, the infants were played two rhymes, the rhyme that the mother had been reciting, and a control rhyme from a speaker positions approximately at the mother’s head level and attenuated so that it would be of the same volume for the fetus as the mother’s voice (Decasper et. al. 159). The recording was of a female grad student (160). They found that the control rhyme made no change in the fetuses’ behavior, but that the rhyme the mothers had been reciting produced a statistically significant drop in heart rate, indicating that the fetus both could differentiate that rhyme from other sounds, and that this had a soothing or calming effect on the fetus (162).

This study had many strong features. One of the best aspects of it was the fact that it went to great lengths to control variables, especially the mother’s potential impact on the fetus. They thought, for instance, that hearing the rhyme might have an effect on the mother, which could in turn affect the fetus and cloud the results. To stop this possibility, the experiment design included masking the sound of the recording for the mother by playing instrumental rhythmic guitar music at a comfortable level (162).

Furthermore, by having a recording and not the mother speak the rhyme during testing, the researchers could tell that it fetuses could discern certain sounds even when not exactly replicated. The weaknesses of this study were mostly its limited scope. The researchers established that repeated snatches of sound that the fetus could hear would have a physiological effect on them, but as the researchers noted, this had long been suspected (164). Furthermore, it was not clear exactly what caused this – what about the rhymes could the fetuses detect?

Resonance, rhythm, pitch, or what? The claims made in this article seem well founded and supported by the evidence presented. Furthermore, this study’s results fall largely in line with other research on the topic (164). The small sample size might provide some difficulties, but it was large enough to draw what are, at very least, tentative conclusions, especially given the statistical strength of the evidence (every fetus’s hear rate dropped a standard deviation below its mean heart rate for the duration of the rhyme).

Two things could improve this study: first, a larger sample size. The eventual study had only 17 participants, and more would make the results stronger. Secondly, it would have been interesting for the researchers to attempt several recordings – perhaps one by a male speaker, or one speaking a different rhyme with the same meter, and so on, to try to isolate exactly what the fetus was recognizing from auditory cues. Future studies could build on this research by, as mentioned above, isolating different variables in a particular maternal speech, and could also alter the timing to determine when fetuses begin acquiring this ability.

This could provide invaluable insight on when fetuses truly start responding to external stimuli, as well as giving researchers a clearer idea of what kind of stimuli are most effective in reaching a fetus. This article truly demonstrates the idea, discussed in class, that early development is essential to success in adulthood, and that infants begin adapting to the world around them at an incredibly early age –