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SALT LAKE CITY — Mothers have long known their babies recognize their voice in utero, but now researchers say they recognize language in the womb and remember it after birth.
According to Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University and lead author of the study, babies prenatally recognize vowel sounds found in their mother's native language and show curiosity for vowel sounds of foreign language after birth.
"We have known for over 30 years that we begin learning prenatally by listening to the sound of our mother talking," Moon said. "This is the first study that shows we learn about the particular speech sounds of our mother's language before we are born."
Researchers tested 40 American and 40 Swedish babies between 7 and 75 hours after birth. The infants were given a pacifier connected to a computer to suck on that controlled the number of times Swedish and English vowels were played. The more times a baby sucked, the more a vowel would play and after a pause in sucking, a new vowel would play.
Regardless of postnatal language exposure, babies in both groups consistently sucked more when the foreign vowels were introduced than when native vowels were played, indicating they were "ready for something novel" and that newborns have the capacity to learn and remember sounds of a language, researchers said in the journal Acta Paediatrica.
"This is a stunning finding," said Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. "We thought infants were 'born learning' but now we know they learn even earlier. They are not phonetically naïve at birth."
A fetus develops hearing mechanisms at 30 weeks of gestation, meaning they can hear and possibly benefit from language exposure for the last 10 weeks they spend in utero.
"We can't waste early curiosity," Kuhl said. "The fact that the infants can learn the vowels in utero means they are putting some pretty sophisticated brain centers to work, even before birth."
