Babies Can Hear and Remember First Lullabies While Still in the Womb

A baby may not need to be born for it to listen to music. It turns out that an infant can recognize a lullaby heard in the womb for several months after birth, potentially supporting later speech development. The findings reveal yet again that conditions during development can impact a child long after birth.

In order to learn how a baby might be affected while still in the womb by music, the researchers focused on 24 women during their final trimesters. Half of these women played the melody of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to their fetuses five days a week for the final stages of their pregnancies.

So what happened? It turned out that the brains of the babies who heard the melody in utero reacted more strongly to the familiar melody both immediately and four months after birth when compared with the control group. This showed that, in fact, fetuses can recognize and remember sounds from the outside world.

"Even though our earlier research indicated that fetuses could learn minor details of speech, we did not know how long they could retain the information," said Eino Partanen, one of the researchers, in a news release. "These results show that babies are capable of learning at a very young age, and that the effects of the learning remain apparent in the brain for a long time."

That's not all the researchers found, though. It's very possible that song and speech are beneficial for the fetus in terms of speech development. The processing of singing and speech in a baby's brain is partly based on shared mechanisms. This means that hearing a song can support a baby's speech development.

"This is the first study to track how long fetal memories remain in the brain," said Minna Huotilainen, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The results are significant, as studying the responses in the brain let us focus on the foundations of fetal memory. The early mechanisms of memory are currently unknown."

The findings reveal that sound can impact a fetus while still in the room. In addition, it may have important implications for understanding how general noise, such as workplace noise, can affect a child during the final trimester. Scientists are currently further investigating how sound can impact a fetus.

The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.