Babies may start to learn language before they are born
Newborn babies respond differently to their mother tongue, suggesting that exposure to language in the uterus may provide the foundations for learning
By Chen Ly
22 November 2023
Newborn babies seem to recognise the language spoken by their mother
Fida Hussain/AFP/ Getty Images
Experiments with newborn babies suggest they can already recognise their mother tongue, hinting that language learning may begin before birth.
“We’ve known for a while that fetuses hear towards the end of gestation,” says Judit Gervain at the University of Padua in Italy. “[Newborn babies] can recognise their mother’s voice and prefer it over other female voices, and they can even recognise the language their mother spoke during pregnancy.”
To investigate further, Gervain and her colleagues studied the brain activity of 49 babies with French-speaking mothers aged between one and five days old.
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Each newborn was fitted with a small cap that contained 10 electrodes placed close to regions of the brain linked to speech perception.
The team then played recordings that began with 3 minutes of silence, then 7-minute excerpts from the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears in English, French and Spanish in different orders, followed by another bout of silence.
When the babies listened to the French audio, the team saw a spike in a type of brain signal called long-range temporal correlations, which is linked to speech perception and processing. These signals were reduced when the babies heard other languages.
