Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.

Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they’ve heard.

‘The mother has first dibs on influencing the child’s brain,’ said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. ‘The vowel sounds in her speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them.’

Previously, researchers had shown that newborns are born ready to learn and begin to discriminate between language sounds within the first months of life, but there was no evidence that language learning had occurred in utero.

‘This is the first study that shows fetuses learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother’s language,’ said Christine Moon, lead author and a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. ‘This study moves the measurable result […]