Infants may begin acquiring language skills in the womb

Experiments with newborn babies suggest that they are already aware of their native language, suggesting that language learning may begin before birth.

“We’ve known for some time that fetuses can hear towards the end of pregnancy.” judith jarvan at the University of Padua, Italy. “[Newborn babies] They can recognize their mother’s voice and prefer it to other women’s voices, and can even recognize the language spoken by their mother during pregnancy. ”

To investigate further, Gervain and his colleagues studied the brain activity of 49 infants between one and five days old who had French-speaking mothers.

Each newborn was fitted with a small cap containing 10 electrodes placed near areas of the brain associated with speech recognition.

The team then played a recording that began with three minutes of silence, followed by a seven-minute excerpt from the story. goldilocks and the three bears They took turns speaking in English, French, and Spanish, then there was silence again.

When the babies heard French sounds, the researchers observed spikes in a type of brain signal called long-range temporal correlation, which is related to the perception and processing of sounds. These signals decreased when babies heard other languages.

The researchers found that in a group of 17 infants who last heard French, this spike in neural activity persisted during the subsequent silence.

These findings suggest that babies may already perceive their mother’s native language as more important, Jarvan says. “This is essentially facilitating the learning of their native language,” she says.

The researchers now hope to conduct experiments with babies whose mothers speak different languages, particularly Asian and African languages, to see how generalizable their results are. They also want to investigate how the development of speech perception changes in the womb in infants who have less typical prenatal experiences, such as premature infants.

“Of course, it’s good to talk to your stomach,” Jarvan says. “But we have shown that natural everyday activities, like shopping or talking to neighbors, are already vocal enough to serve as scaffolds for babies’ learning. ”