Study Proves the Ability of Infants to Distinguish Foreign Languages While in Their Mother's Womb

SadaNews - Can newborns recognize foreign languages they were exposed to while still in the womb, and distinguish them from their native language or languages they have not heard before? A research team in Montreal, Canada has found that newborn infants who listened to stories in foreign languages while still fetuses respond to those languages in the same way they do to their mother tongue.

This study, published in the scientific journal Nature Communication, which specializes in communication and language skills, is the first of its kind to use brain imaging techniques to confirm a scientific hypothesis long doubted by psychology and neuroscience experts.

Previous studies had shown that fetuses and newborns could recognize familiar sounds and even preferred to listen to their mother tongue immediately after birth. However, those findings relied on behavioral observations such as infants' turning their heads or changes in their heart rates, without reaching conclusive evidence through measuring changes in the brain while the infants listen to their mother tongue.

In statements to the specialized scientific site "Scientific American", Anna Gallagher, a neurology specialist at the University of Montreal and head of the study team, stated: "We cannot say that infants learn language before birth, but we can say that newborns feel familiarity towards the language or languages they were exposed to while still fetuses, as exposure to these languages while in the womb helps form communication networks in the brain that influence their response to language after birth."

About sixty pregnant women participated in the experiment at 35 weeks of gestation, with 39 of them exposed to audio recordings of stories in French, their mother tongue, for ten minutes, followed by recordings of the same stories in German and Hebrew for another ten minutes, with this process repeated daily throughout the pregnancy. Researcher Andrian René, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Montreal, explained that the choice of the German and Hebrew languages was due to the significant differences between them and French in terms of phonetics and articulation properties.

The remaining pregnant participants, 21 women in the control group, were not exposed to any specific external stimuli; thus, the fetuses in their wombs were subjected to their mother French language under normal daily life conditions.

During the first ten hours to three days after birth, the research team monitored how the newborns' brains responded to German, Hebrew, and French languages using functional infrared spectroscopy. This technique measures changes in blood oxygen saturation rates in the brain during various cognitive functions.

Researchers found an increase in activity in the left temporal lobe, which is the language processing center of the brain, in all participating newborns when listening to phrases in French. However, when newborns were exposed to German and Hebrew, the same mental activity only occurred in infants who had previously heard those languages while still fetuses. Newborns in the control group who had not been exposed to these languages as fetuses did not show any mental activity in the language processing areas when listening to German and Hebrew.

Researcher Anna Carolina Kwan, a pediatric neurology specialist and member of the Brazilian Academy of Neurology, believes that this study supports the idea that newborn brains are not a "blank slate"; rather, the environment a fetus lives in during pregnancy shapes some of its mental functions even before it is born. Researchers have not yet determined the duration of exposure to a foreign language sufficient for the fetus to become familiar with it and recognize it later; some previous studies regarding the effects of auditory environments on fetus development indicated that this period could be measured in hours, and other research has revealed that short periods not exceeding 15 minutes might be enough to create the same effect of recognizing foreign languages.

Kwan added, "This study does not advise pregnant women to expose fetuses to foreign languages to make them smarter or multilingual later in life." She clarified that studying the impact of fetal exposure to foreign languages on later language development is essential for understanding language disorders and difficulties in children, which affect between 5 and 10 percent of children in the United States alone. She concluded that "this research provides more scientific evidence that language development begins at an early stage prior to birth, which may help in diagnosing and treating language delays in children."