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Maternal depression symptoms are common in pregnant women and can have negative effects on offspring's emotional development. This study investigated the association between prenatal maternal depression symptoms (assessed with the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale at 24 weeks of gestation) and auditory perception of emotional stimuli in 3-year-olds ( n = 58) from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we examined mismatch responses for happy, sad, and angry sounds presented among neutral stimuli. A positive association between maternal depression symptoms and the emotional mismatch responses in an early time window (80-120 ms) was found, indicating that brain responses of children of mothers with depressive symptoms were weaker to happy sounds, though the results did not survive Bonferroni correction. There were no clear associations in the sad and angry emotional categories. Our results tentatively support that the 3-year-old children of mothers with depression symptoms may be less sensitive to automatically detect happy sounds compared to children whose mothers do not display symptoms of depression., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Luotonen, Railo, Acosta, Huotilainen, Lavonius, Karlsson, Karlsson and Tuulari.)

As the human auditory system is highly malleable in infancy, perinatal risk factors, such as preterm birth, may affect auditory development. In comparison to healthy full-term infants, preterm infants show abnormal auditory brain responses at term age, which may have long-term detrimental outcomes. To achieve an optimal neonatal care environment for preterm-born infants, many early interventions have been developed. Musical interventions developed for neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) have shown beneficial effects on vital functions and weight gain of preterm infants and might also influence basic auditory processing and thereby enhance outcomes. In the present study, we tested the effect of parental singing during kangaroo care on auditory processing of standardized audio stimuli. Preterm infants (born between 24 and 32 weeks of gestation) were randomized to singing intervention ( n = 13) or control ( n = 8) groups. The auditory processing was tested using two audio paradigms assessed with magnetoencephalography (MEG) at term corresponding age. To verify that the paradigms elicit responses in MEG, we studied 12 healthy full-term infants. In the singing intervention group, parents were instructed by a music therapist twice a week for 4 weeks to sing or hum during kangaroo care in an infant-directed way. The control group received standard kangaroo care. The results show that the infants in the singing intervention group show larger neural responses than those in the control group when controlling for the total amount of singing during kangaroo care. Our findings suggest that incorporating singing into kangaroo care may be beneficial for preterm infants, but the effect may not be due to exposure to singing but instead positive parenting, improved parental self-esteem and improved caregiver sensitivity., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Partanen, Mårtensson, Hugoson, Huotilainen, Fellman and Ådén.)

Preterm birth carries a risk for adverse neurodevelopment. Cognitive dysfunctions, such as language disorders may manifest as atypical sound discrimination already in early infancy. As infant-directed singing has been shown to enhance language acquisition in infants, we examined whether parental singing during skin-to-skin care (kangaroo care) improves speech sound discrimination in preterm infants. Forty-five preterm infants born between 26 and 33 gestational weeks (GW) and their parents participated in this cluster-randomized controlled trial (ClinicalTrials ID IRB00003181SK). In both groups, parents conducted kangaroo care during 33-40 GW. In the singing intervention group ( n = 24), a certified music therapist guided parents to sing or hum during daily kangaroo care. In the control group ( n = 21), parents conducted standard kangaroo care and were not instructed to use their voices. Parents in both groups reported the duration of daily intervention. Auditory event-related potentials were recorded with electroencephalogram at term age using a multi-feature paradigm consisting of phonetic and emotional speech sound changes and a one-deviant oddball paradigm with pure tones. In the multi-feature paradigm, prominent mismatch responses (MMR) were elicited to the emotional sounds and many of the phonetic deviants in the singing intervention group and in the control group to some of the emotional and phonetic deviants. A group difference was found as the MMRs were larger in the singing intervention group, mainly due to larger MMRs being elicited to the emotional sounds, especially in females. The overall duration of the singing intervention (range 15-63 days) was positively associated with the MMR amplitudes for both phonetic and emotional stimuli in both sexes, unlike the daily singing time (range 8-120 min/day). In the oddball paradigm, MMRs for the non-speech sounds were elicited in both groups and no group differences nor connections between the singing time and the response amplitudes were found. These results imply that repeated parental singing during kangaroo care improved auditory discrimination of phonetic and emotional speech sounds in preterm infants at term age. Regular singing routines can be recommended for parents to promote the development of the auditory system and auditory processing of speech sounds in preterm infants., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Kostilainen, Partanen, Mikkola, Wikström, Pakarinen, Fellman and Huotilainen.)

The maturation of 5-6-year-old children's auditory discrimination - indicated by the development of the auditory event-related-potentials (ERPs) - has not been previously studied in longitudinal settings. For the first time, we present here the results based on extensive dataset collected from 75 children. We followed the 5- to 6-year-olds for 20 months and measured their ERPs four times with the same multifeature paradigm with phonemic stimuli. The amplitude of the mismatch negativity (MMN) response increased during this time for vowel, vowel duration and frequency changes. Furthermore, the P3a component started to mature toward adult-like positivity for the vowel, intensity and frequency deviants and the late discriminative negativity (LDN) component decreased with age for vowel and intensity deviants. All the changes in the components seemed to happen during the second follow-up year, when Finnish children are taught letter symbols and other preliminary academic skills before going to school at the age of seven. Therefore, further studies are needed to clarify if these changes in the auditory discrimination are purely age-related or due to increasing linguistic knowledge of the children.

Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highly sensitive to duration cues since in Finnish, vowel and consonant duration determine word meaning. Using a correlational approach with a set of behavioral sound feature discrimination tasks, brainstem recordings, and a musical sophistication questionnaire, we find no evidence for an association between musical sophistication and more precise duration processing in Finnish speakers either in the auditory brainstem response or in behavioral tasks, but they do show an enhanced pitch discrimination compared to Finnish speakers with less musical experience and show greater duration modulation in a complex task. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect set for certain sound features which corresponds to the phonology of the native language, leaving an opportunity for music experience-based enhancement of sound features not explicitly encoded in the language (such as pitch, which is not explicitly encoded in Finnish). Finally, the pattern of duration modulation in more musically sophisticated Finnish speakers suggests integrated feature processing for greater efficiency in a real world musical situation. These results have implications for research into the specificity of plasticity in the auditory system as well as to the effects of interaction of specific language features with musical experiences.

We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study effects of selective attention on the processing of attended and unattended spoken syllables and letters. Participants were presented with syllables randomly occurring in the left or right ear and spoken by different voices and with a concurrent foveal stream of consonant letters written in darker or lighter fonts. During auditory phonological (AP) and non-phonological tasks, they responded to syllables in a designated ear starting with a vowel and spoken by female voices, respectively. These syllables occurred infrequently among standard syllables starting with a consonant and spoken by male voices. During visual phonological and non-phonological tasks, they responded to consonant letters with names starting with a vowel and to letters written in dark fonts, respectively. These letters occurred infrequently among standard letters with names starting with a consonant and written in light fonts. To examine genuine effects of attention and task on ERPs not overlapped by ERPs associated with target processing or deviance detection, these effects were studied only in ERPs to auditory and visual standards. During selective listening to syllables in a designated ear, ERPs to the attended syllables were negatively displaced during both phonological and non-phonological auditory tasks. Selective attention to letters elicited an early negative displacement and a subsequent positive displacement (Pd) of ERPs to attended letters being larger during the visual phonological than non-phonological task suggesting a higher demand for attention during the visual phonological task. Active suppression of unattended speech during the AP and non-phonological tasks and during the visual phonological tasks was suggested by a rejection positivity (RP) to unattended syllables. We also found evidence for suppression of the processing of task-irrelevant visual stimuli in visual ERPs during auditory tasks involving left-ear syllables.