Babies’ language development begins before they are born. A group of Italian and French researchers has shown that the brains of newborns react and learn when they hear the language in which their mothers spoke during the last months of gestation. This response, however, does not occur when babies listen to other languages, which confirms that learning already begins during prenatal experiences.
“The language heard before birth shapes the brain, and the baby learns from it,” explains Judit Gervain, researcher at the Neuroscience Center of Padova, Italy, and leader of the study, in statements to La Vanguardia. Her results, published this Thursday in the journal Science Advances, show that language contributes to developing the brain, which would explain, in part, how quickly babies are able to acquire it and become familiar with it.
“It is important to highlight that all of the mother’s speech is transmitted to the fetus, not just that which the mother directs to the baby,” says the expert. Parents do not have to act in any specific way to encourage their children’s learning before birth, because “most mothers talk enough naturally so that the baby can learn,” she concludes.
The fact that the prenatal stage contributes to acquiring the mother tongue does not mean that it is not possible to learn and master a language when there has been no such experience prior to birth. This is the case of premature children, immigrants or those who require a cochlear implant, who learn as their mother a language that they did not hear before birth, the authors point out in the article. The key, they say, is to expose them to it from a young age.
Researchers have wanted to see what the baby’s learning process is like from a neural point of view, an issue that still accumulates many questions. To do this, they measured how the brain activity of 33 newborns born to French mothers, who were between one and five days old, changed after listening to a phrase from the children’s story Goldilocks and the Three Bears 100 times in Spanish, English and French. .
By comparing brain scans before and after repeated exposure to the passage, the researchers saw that the newborns’ brain activity showed lasting changes immediately after hearing the French. On the other hand, the alterations did not occur with either Spanish or English, which were used little or not at all by their mothers.
“Since fetuses hear towards the end of gestation, this prenatal experience already makes them sensitive to the language they heard” in the womb, Gervais hypothesizes. Babies begin to perceive outside noises around the seventh month of pregnancy, although attenuated and distorted by the mother’s body. They do not receive the individual sounds of each letter, but they do distinguish the syllables, and the accent, tone and intonation of what we say.
In fact, the study results also show this subtlety. The way in which the brain processes the sounds of each letter generates a different brain activity than that derived from the processing of syllables, so by analyzing the encephalogram it is possible to identify what type of sounds the baby recognizes. The researchers saw that the brain of newborns does not respond to phonemes, but it does recognize and react to the sound of syllables. This aspect confirms the general finding of the study, that babies only recognize those aspects of language that they heard in the womb.
The question now is whether this prenatal learning is an exclusive property of language, or whether other auditory experiences, such as music, can also contribute to the development of the fetal brain. “We already know a lot about the child’s brain, but much more is needed,” says Gervais, “particularly studies like this one where we show evidence of learning as it happens.”