The Fetal Sound Environment of Sheep

Armitage, Sally E.; Baldwin, B.A.; Vince, Margaret A.

doi:10.1126/science.7375927

Cited by 90 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…The tadpole develops in an aquatic environment with acoustic characteristics similar to that of the mammalian uterine environment, such as low-pass transmission of sound, elevated propagation velocity, and relatively high ambient noise from structurally contiguous sources (36,37). The metamorphic transition may thus provide a nonfetal model for investigating neural plasticity in developing mammalian and other amniotic auditory systems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Premetamorphic animals (stages [25][26][27][28][29][30] have no or rudimentary external hind limb buds. Early prometamorphic animals (stages [31][32][33][34][35][36][37] show emerging hind limb buds at different degrees of differentiation. Tadpoles in these early stages have neither an external tympanum nor an extratympanic opercularis system for sound conduction to the inner ear organs, and there are several hypotheses regarding the identity of a potential acoustic pathway in these animals (11)(12)(13).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Transient “deafness” accompanies auditory development during metamorphosis from tadpole to frog

Boatright-Horowitz

Simmons

1997

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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During metamorphosis, ranid frogs shift from a purely aquatic to a partly terrestrial lifestyle. The central auditory system undergoes functional and neuroanatomical reorganization in parallel with the development of new sound conduction pathways adapted for the detection of airborne sounds. Neural responses to sounds can be recorded from the auditory midbrain of tadpoles shortly after hatching, with higher rates of synchronous neural activity and lower sharpness of tuning than observed in postmetamorphic animals. Shortly before the onset of metamorphic climax, there is a brief ''deaf'' period during which no auditory activity can be evoked from the midbrain, and a loss of connectivity is observed between medullary and midbrain auditory nuclei. During the final stages of metamorphic development, auditory function and neural connectivity are restored. The acoustic communication system of the adult frog emerges from these periods of anatomical and physiological plasticity during metamorphosis.Many species of anuran amphibians undergo a developmental process called metamorphosis, during which the aquatic larval tadpole transforms into a partly terrestrial frog. Metamorphosis involves considerable alterations in body morphology, peripheral and central nervous system structures, and behaviors (1, 2). This process has been studied extensively in several neural systems, particularly visual, motor, and lateral line systems (3-7). Little is known about the development of central auditory system function across metamorphosis (6-8) even though acoustic cues play a paramount role in regulating social behaviors in adult frogs (9). We report here physiological work characterizing neural responses to sounds in a central auditory nucleus during the period of neuroanatomical rearrangement across the transition from tadpole to frog.Stages of metamorphosis are classified according to changes in body morphology in the posthatching period (10). Premetamorphic animals (stages 25-30) have no or rudimentary external hind limb buds. Early prometamorphic animals (stages 31-37) show emerging hind limb buds at different degrees of differentiation. Tadpoles in these early stages have neither an external tympanum nor an extratympanic opercularis system for sound conduction to the inner ear organs, and there are several hypotheses regarding the identity of a potential acoustic pathway in these animals (11-13). Late prometamorphic animals (stages 38-41) show final stages of external hind limb differentiation and internal development of forelimbs. By stage 41, the extratympanic sound conduction pathway operating in adults (which includes the opercularis muscle and the operculum cartilage, connecting the shoulder girdle to the oval window in the inner ear) has developed (11). Animals in metamorphic climax (stages 42-45) show emergence of forelimbs, degeneration of the tail, and remodeling of the head, including loss of the oral disk, broadening of the mouth, and change in eye position. The lateral line system has degenerated by climax. I...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Transient “deafness” accompanies auditory development during metamorphosis from tadpole to frog

Boatright-Horowitz

Simmons

1997

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…speculated that the rhythmic segmentation procedures might have their origin in infants' initial vocabulary acquisition. It has long been known that infants are capable of discrimination of rhythms (Demany, McKenzie & Vurpillot, 1977); and as mentioned in the introduction, above, the rhythmic characteristics of speech signals may be perceptible to the unborn infant in the womb (Armitage et al, 1980;Abrams et al, 2000). In the past few years, moreover, evidence has accrued that rhythmic sensitivity in infancy can effect precisely the discrimination between groups of languages which would result from a classification in terms of segmentation strategies based on this aspect of phonological structure.…”

Section: Escape From Language-specific Listeningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At only a few days of age they show preference for speech in the mother's language over speech in another language (Moon, Panneton-Cooper & Fifer, 1993). The rhythmic patterns of speech can, it appears, be perceived in the womb before birth (Armitage, Baldwin & Vince, 1980;Abrams, Gerhardt, Huang, Peters & Langford, 2000), and young babies can discriminate between languages with different rhythmic structure but not between two rhythmically similar languages (Nazzi, Bertoncini & Mehler, 1998).…”

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confidence: 97%

Listening to a second language through the ears of a first

Cutler

2000

INTP

103

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The processes by which listeners recognize spoken language are highly language-specific. Listeners' expectations of how meaning is expressed in words and sentences are formed by the lexicon and grammar of the native language; but the phonology plays an even more immediate role. Thus the native phoneme repertoire constrains listeners' ability to discriminate phonetic contrasts; and a further area in which such constraints arise is the segmentation of continuous speech into its component words. A large body of research is summarised here, motivating three conclusions: (1) In segmenting speech, speakers of different languages apply different heuristic procedures, efficiently exploiting the specific phonological structure of their various languages. (2) These procedures have become part of the listeners' processing system, to an extent that they are also applied when listening to nonnative languages, even though this may lead to inefficiency. (3) It may be impossible to acquire the use of multiple procedures of this kind; but it is possible to inhibit the misapplication of native procedures to other languages for which they are inefficient.

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“…The fetus develops in an acoustically rich environment including the mother's voice. Low-frequency sounds dominate (19), whereas pure tones with higher frequencies (from external sources) are more attenuated. A certain amount of masking of low-frequency sounds is to be expected, though, due to the presence of low-frequency intrauterine noise, and tests offetal hearing commonly use frequencies ranging from 500 Hz to 4 kHz.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Model of Prenatal Acquisition of Speech Parameters

1995

How We Learn; How We Remember: Toward an Understanding of Brain and Neural Systems

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An unsupervised neural network model inductively acquires the ability to dis h categorically the stop consonants of English, in a manner c ent with prenatal and early postnatal auditory experience, and without reference to any spcialz knowledge of ligisic structure or the properties of speech. This argues against the common assumption that inguisic knowledge, and spee perception particular, cannot be learned and must therefore be innately specified.Chomsky's view that the "core" features ofhuman linguistic ability are innate (1) (2,(7)(8)(9)(10). In this view, linguistic development is not a learning process, but a process of selecting the discriminations useful to the maturing infant and forgetting those that are not useful (11). Supporting this belief is the discovery that infants, unlike adults, can discriminate phonetic units of languages they have never heard (12, 13). It is believed that such complex, cognitive behaviors of infants cannot arise from prenatal, experience-dependent modification of neurons.However, such modifications have been shown to play a critical role in the development of neuronal selectivity. In visual cortex, for example, experience-dependent development proceeds rapidly from the onset of visual function through the so-called "critical period" and is strongly dependent on the visual environment in which the animal is raised. In the following study, we show that the prenatal auditory environment combined with a model of neuronal modification similar to that proposed for visual cortex can account for the acquisition of some basic speech contrasts as well as categorical perception of speech sounds.The onset ofhearing for humans begins as early as the 24th week of gestation (14,15), raising the possibility that a lengthy "critical period" for auditory development may take place during the last several months offetal life (16). Clearly, auditory experience in immature animals can alter frequency tuning (17) and spatial mapping (18) in auditory centers of the brain, and cognitive studies ofhuman infants have shown that both prenatal (3) and postnatal (4) experiences may alter aspects of human speech perception prior to language acquisition. The fetus develops in an acoustically rich environment including the mother's voice. Low-frequency sounds dominate (19), whereas pure tones with higher frequencies (from external sources) are more attenuated. A certain amount of masking of low-frequency sounds is to be expected, though, due to the presence of low-frequency intrauterine noise, and tests offetal hearing commonly use frequencies ranging from 500 Hz to 4 kHz. Low-frequency, broad-band noises are expected to be most efficient in producing responses in such tests (20). No adequate characterization of the transfer functions of the fetal middle ear exists (21).The auditory periphery is characterized by broad bandpass tuning and poor phase-locking abilities during early mammalian development (22), though the "circuits" passing encoded information to auditory cortex appear to develop as fu...

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The Fetal Sound Environment of Sheep

Cited by 90 publications

References 6 publications

Transient “deafness” accompanies auditory development during metamorphosis from tadpole to frog

Transient “deafness” accompanies auditory development during metamorphosis from tadpole to frog

Listening to a second language through the ears of a first

A Model of Prenatal Acquisition of Speech Parameters

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