"Babies start processing language before they are born, a new study suggests. A research team in Montreal has found that newborns who had heard short stories in foreign languages while in the womb process those languages similarly to their native tongue. The study, published in August in Nature Communications Biology, is the first to use brain imaging to show what neuroscientists and psychologists had long suspected."
"The research team recruited 60 people for the experiment, all of them about 35 weeks into their pregnancy. Of those, 39 exposed their fetuses to 10 minutes of prerecorded stories in French (their native language) and another 10 minutes of the same stories in either Hebrew or German at least once every other day until birth. These languages were chosen because their acoustic and phonological properties are very distinctfrom French and from each other,"
Sixty pregnant participants at roughly 35 weeks' gestation took part. Thirty-nine fetuses received repeated prenatal exposure to ten minutes of prerecorded stories in French and ten minutes in either Hebrew or German at least every other day until birth. Twenty-one fetuses experienced only natural French exposure. Neonatal brain imaging at birth showed that newborns with prenatal exposure processed the previously heard foreign languages similarly to their native language. Prenatal acoustic familiarity thus shapes newborn language brain networks. Prior behavioral work had shown fetal recognition of voices, rhythms, and early native-language preference.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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