Babies begin to ‘learn’ language before they enter the world – 11/23/2023 – Science

Those born in Brazil usually hear their first “Portuguese lessons” while still in their mother’s womb, starting to get used to the characteristic rhythm of our language in the final months of pregnancy. This conclusion is not valid, of course, only for the Portuguese language, but for all mother tongues in the world, indicates a study carried out by European researchers.

The team led by Benedetta Mariani, from the University of Padua (northern Italy), showed that a higher affinity for the child’s family language begins to be built in the womb by carrying out a series of experiments — obviously, non-invasive — with babies newborns. Children’s brain activity shows significant differences when they hear their mother tongue and when they are exposed to foreign languages.

Details of the discovery have just been published in the specialized journal Science Advances. Mariani and his colleagues from France and the Netherlands were interested in understanding a little better one of the most impressive capabilities of human cognition: the ease with which most people learn all the essential elements of a language, no matter how complicated, in first years of life.

This facility, sometimes considered a “language instinct”, is obviously not restricted to the language that the future baby hears during pregnancy (to be more precise, from a moment between the 24th and 28th week of pregnancy, a period in which that the fetus begins to distinguish sounds from outside).

Babies who are adopted by parents from other countries, for example, learn the way their new family speaks with equal ease. And the same usually goes for children of immigrants, who tend to become bilingual without an accent very quickly, as long as they arrive in the new country at a young age.

Previous studies have already shown, however, that newborns tend to prefer their mother’s voice, when compared to that of other women, and also voices that speak their mother’s language, rather than foreign languages. On the other hand, the environment inside the uterus seems to act as a filter that blocks certain sound frequencies (since there is a liquid barrier between the fetus and the outside world).

This means that, at this stage, babies are not able to capture the exact sounds of consonants and vowels, for example, but rather the so-called prosody – the “rise and fall” of intonation in speech, the characteristic way of “singing” syllables and phrases when we talk.

In the experiments, Mariani and his colleagues “volunteered” newborns who had French as their mother tongue. 49 babies (19 of them female) aged between 1 and 5 days old participated in the study. In the experimental protocol, babies remained in a silent space for three minutes; then, they heard a calm voice telling the famous children’s story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” for seven minutes; Finally, there was another three-minute silence.

The trick of the experimental scheme is that the fairy tale was heard by the children in three different languages ​​(French, Spanish and English, in random order). Spanish was included on the list for its relative structural similarity to French, while English is the most distant language of the trio. While listening, babies undergo an electroencephalography exam, a measurement of brain activity that is made using a cap with electrodes.

By analyzing the brain activity of newborns, the researchers identified, roughly speaking, a much more coordinated reaction to French than to the two other languages ​​– as if the babies’ neurons reacted by saying “Ah, I’ve heard that before!” and extract information from the recognized language more efficiently.

One possibility is that this type of process happens, to some extent, in other types of auditory learning, such as music, although this still needs to be investigated in more detail.