Can Babies Recognize Words from the Womb?

Watch what you say in front of your newborn, and even when he or she is still in the womb. A new study shows the sounds heard from outside the mother's belly can actually be processed before birth, beginning the start of cognitive development.  

"If you put your hand over your mouth and speak, that's very similar to the situation the fetus is in," cognitive neuroscientist Eino Partanen of the University of Helsinki said, via Science AAAS. "You can hear the rhythm of speech, rhythm of music, and so on."

According to the 1988 study, it suggests that newborns could actually recognize the music of their mother's favorite soap opera. More recent studies have also helped to expand the idea of fetal learning to show that many in the womb begin to familiarize themselves with the sounds going on in the outside world, including their parent's native tongue.

This particular study tested the theory by using EEG sensors in order to look for neural memories from the womb.

"Once we learn a sound, if it's repeated to us often enough, we form a memory of it, which is activated when we hear the sound again," he explains. This memory speeds up recognition of sounds in the learner's native language and can be detected as a pattern of brain waves, even in a sleeping baby. The results show that memory helps to speed up recognition of certain sounds that can be detected via brain waves of the baby.

Expectant mothers were given a recording to play several times a week in which a phrase was repeated many times, with a certain variation of a different pitch or vowel sound. When the children were heard and played a variation of the sound, they played this word more than 25,000 times.

Those that heard early recordings of the world were able to recognize the vowel and pitch early on.

"This leads us to believe that the fetus can learn much more detailed information than we previously thought," Partanen said, via the news organization..

What do you think?

More information regarding the story can be found via the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.