The ability of human fetuses to recognize their own mother's voice was examined. Sixty term fetuses were assigned to one of two conditions during which they were exposed to a tape recording of their mother or a female stranger reading a passage. Voice stimuli were delivered through a loudspeaker held approximately 10 cm above the maternal abdomen and played at an average of 95 dB SPL. Each condition consisted of three 2-min periods: no stimulus, voice (mother or stranger), and no stimulus. Fetal heart rate increased in response to the mother's voice and decreased in response to the stranger's; both responses were sustained for 4 min. The finding of differential behavior in response to a familiar versus a novel voice provides evidence that experience influences fetal voice processing. It supports an epigenetic model of speech perception, presuming an interaction between genetic expression of neural development and species-specific experience.

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An adaptive protection scheme using digital relays with a communication network is proposed for the protection of the distributed systems. The impact of distributed generators on protection coordination is first discussed. Then, an adaptive protection scheme is proposed for distributed systems with distributed generation (DG). Simulated results on an actual distribution system show that the proposed approach can perform adaptive primary and backup protection functions under both balanced and unbalanced fault conditions. Also, the proposed approach is adaptive to the fault types as well as capacities of DG. Compared with the traditional current protection scheme, the primary and backup protection regions have been extended considerably.