The human voice provides a wealth of social information, including who is speaking. A salient voice in a child’s life is mother’s voice, which guides social function during development. Here we identify brain circuits that are selectively engaged in children by their mother’s voice and show that this brain activity predicts social communication abilities. Nonsense words produced by mother activate multiple brain systems, including reward, emotion, and face-processing centers, reflecting how widely mother’s voice is broadcast throughout a child’s brain. Importantly, this activity provides a neural fingerprint of children’s social communication abilities. This approach provides a template for investigating social function in clinical disorders, e.g., autism, in which perception of biologically salient voices may be impaired.

The social worlds of young children primarily revolve around parents and caregivers, who play a key role in guiding children’s social and cognitive development. However, a hallmark of adolescence is a shift in orientation toward nonfamilial social targets, an adaptive process that prepares adolescents for their independence. Little is known regarding neurobiological signatures underlying changes in adolescents’ social orientation. Using functional brain imaging of human voice processing in children and adolescents (ages 7-16), we demonstrate distinct neural signatures for mother’s voice and nonfamilial voices across child and adolescent development in reward and social valuation systems, instantiated in nucleus accumbens and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. While younger children showed greater activity in these brain systems for mother’s voice compared with nonfamilial voices, older adolescents showed the opposite effect with increased activity for nonfamilial compared with mother’s voice. Findings uncover a critical role for reward and social valuative brain systems in the pronounced changes in adolescents’ orientation toward nonfamilial social targets. Our approach provides a template for examining developmental shifts in social reward and motivation in individuals with pronounced social impairments, including adolescents with autism.

Engaging with vocal sounds is critical for children’s social-emotional learning, and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often ‘tune out’ voices in their environment. Little is known regarding the neurobiological basis of voice processing and its link to social impairments in ASD. Here, we perform the first comprehensive brain network analysis of voice processing in children with ASD. We examined neural responses elicited by unfamiliar voices and mother’s voice, a biologically salient voice for social learning, and identified a striking relationship between social communication abilities in children with ASD and activation in key structures of reward and salience processing regions. Functional connectivity between voice-selective and reward regions during voice processing predicted social communication in children with ASD and distinguished them from typically developing children. Results support the Social Motivation Theory of ASD by showing reward system deficits associated with the processing of a critical social stimulus, mother’s voice, in children with ASD.