Prenatal Mouth Movements: Can We Identify Co-Ordinated Fetal Mouth and LIP Actions Necessary for Feeding?

Observations of prenatal movement patterns of mouth and lips essential for feeding could have the potential for an assessment of the readiness to feed after birth. Although there is some research on suckingper se, we know very little about prenatal preparatory movements for sucking, namely, the ability to co-ordinate opening the mouth widely and then pursing the lips as if around a teat or nipplein utero. The purpose of the present study was to test two hypotheses using an adapted version of the Facial Action Coding Scheme: first that mouth stretch (AU 27) will be followed by lip pucker (AU 18), and second that these coordinated movement patterns will increase as a function of gestational a…