Re-creating womb sounds perks preemies’ attention
Study piped sounds of mothers’ voices, heartbeats into babies’ incubators
WASHINGTON — Recordings of their mothers’ voices and heartbeats may help premature babies pay attention to speech, new research suggests.
Premature babies do better if their acoustical environment approximates what the babies would have heard in the womb, neuroscientist Amir Lahav said at a news conference February 13 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Typically, though, these babies spend a lot of time in hospitals’ neonatal intensive care units, places brimming with beeps, whirs and other sounds generated by life-saving equipment and people. But inside incubators, babies can be deprived of sounds, except for white noise created by the fan.