My work pictured by AI – Alejandra Hüsser

What is this work about? Newborn infants’ first cries carry the pitch accent of the language that dominated their environment while they were in the womb. The fact that their very first communicative acts bear traces of their linguistic environment indicates that the developing brain encodes articulatory patterns already in utero. This precocious learning has been proposed as a significant precursor for linguistic development. We aim to investigate fetal brain responses to speech stimuli in the womb, to illuminate the prenatal developmental trajectory of the brain’s expressive language network. Women during the last trimester of pregnancy will undergo a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in which the fetus in utero is exposed to a variety of simple speech sounds.

The first word that came to mind when seeing the AI-generated picture? Universe.