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The fetal brain and language: a systematic review on structural fetal brain development and later language abilities
Poster Session A, Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Nina Wyman1, Anika van der Klis1, Sonja de Zwarte1, Caroline Junge1; 1Utrecht University
From conception to the first 1000 days of life, this period of enormous brain development overlaps with early and fast language acquisition (Werker & Hensch, 2015). Infancy studies have already demonstrated that brain and language development are linked (Deoni et al., 2016; Turesky et al., 2025), although findings on which specific brain areas are related to language do not provide a straightforward picture (see Silver et al. 2021). Additionally, much less is known about relevance of brain development before birth: the prenatal period. This period is also important for language development (Nannet & Gervain, 2021), as e.g. fetuses develop hearing (around 24 weeks gestation) (Ghio et al., 2021) and the language fetuses are exposed to during pregnancy shapes their language processing after birth (Moon et al., 1993). Thus, this systematic review will aim to synthesize the existing evidence of relationships between prenatal brain development and later language abilities, identify possible findings dependent on imaging type, brain region or language outcome and pinpoint gaps where future research is necessary. We have identified around 8 studies which include prenatal structural imaging of the head/brain of typically developing fetuses and that contain language outcome of these same children at a later stage. To identify these studies, we systematically searched 3 databases (Pubmed, Scopus and PsycInfo) with keywords related to fetuses, brain, neuroimaging and language. Additionally, we checked reference lists of the included studies and contacted these authors for published and unpublished work relating to the scope of our review. After tittle/abstract and full text screening, the Newcastle-Ottawa scale has been used to assess the risk for bias. Our next steps are to systematically describe the characteristics of these included studies. The characteristics will include: type of imaging (ultrasound or MRI), gestational age at imaging (first, second or third trimester and/or gestational age) and age at follow-up (infancy, toddlerhood and/or early childhood). In addition, we hope to synthesize possible trends across these studies relating to the type of brain measures (volume or morphological characteristics), the specific brain regions involved and the language measures used as outcome measure (e.g., Bayley, Mullen Scales). Our full protocol is preregistered on PROSPERO. With the results of this review we hope to systematically identify the amount of work done on the prenatal period of typically developing fetuses relating to later language abilities, highlight which prenatal brain and postnatal language measures have been investigated and determine which areas remain understudied.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition,