Language Learning Process Starts from Womb

The language learning process of a child starts before birth, a new study says.

According to the background information provided in the study, the sensory and brain mechanisms of a baby develop at 30 weeks of gestational age. Lead author of the study Christine Moon and colleagues found language development of a child starting during the last two months, before the child's birth.

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

For the study, researchers looked at 40 infants from Tacoma and Stockholm in Sweden. All the babies were only 30 hours old.

Researchers made the infants listen to vowel sounds in the native language as well as foreign languages.

Pacifiers connected to a computer monitored the babies' reaction and familiarity to particular sounds. Researchers based the study on the length each infant sucked a pacifier while listening to sounds, both familiar and unfamiliar. According to researchers, the action shows babies' ability to distinguish between the sounds that they heard while in their mother's womb and new ones.

Babies were found sucking pacifiers longer for a foreign language when compared to the native language.

"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 of experience with speech sounds from six months of age to before birth."

The study will be published in the journal Acta Paediatrica.