Do fetuses move their lips to the sound that they hear? An observational feasibility study on auditory stimulation in the womb

摘要

BackgroundWe investigate in this feasibility study whether specific lip movements increase prenatally when hearing a particular sound. We hypothesised that fetuses would produce more mouth movements resembling those required to make the sound stimulus they heard (i.e. mouth stretch) compared with a no-sound control group who heard no specific auditory stimuli. Secondly, we predicted that fetuses hearing the sound would produce a similar number of mouth movements unrelated to the sound heard (i.e. lip pucker) as the no-sound group of fetuses.