You can’t start too early to learn language

Watch what you say when your wife is pregnant. The fetus in her belly may be listening and recording what you have said. Of course that is an exaggeration but what is not is that laboratory studies have shown that language learning starts in the womb. In the last trimester fetuses can detect and remember songs, vowel sounds and words. These surprisingly sophisticated linguistic feats offer a new perspective on early learning. The results also raise the possibility of taking steps during pregnancy to help babies at risk for language problems.

“Young babies show a preference for the sounds of their mothers’ voices, familiar nursery rhymes and soothing lullabies, for instance. Four months after birth, babies who had heard “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” while in the womb remembered and recognized the lullaby. They also noted that babies born to mothers who had been hooked on a soap opera during pregnancy stopped fussing when the theme song started. These are just some of the research results reported by the cognitive neuroscientist Eino Partanen of the University of Helsinki and colleagues). . An earlier study found that the findings extend the boundaries of what and when fetuses can learn.

Another researcher (Moon and her colleagues) found that fetuses could learn to discriminate native vowel sounds from foreign ones. These newborns were hooked up to special pacifiers that tracked sucking rates and did more sucking when they heard the more unusual, unfamiliar background sound.

One research group had fetuses ‘listen’ to a made-up word. When the babies’ brain responses were tested with electrodes soon after birth, “a neural signature of familiarity called the mismatch response showed up in those who had heard the word during gestation. These babies’ brains showed a big neural response when a syllable in the fake word was pronounced differently, suggesting that the normal version was familiar.” These last results were reported by Partanen and colleagues in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

All kinds of learning can start really early in life. Lots of implications for the study of both normal and not so normal development.