If you’re about to be a mother, or you have a new little person in your life, you might be concerned about the family wellness issue of language development. Though babies develop the ability to speak at different rates, and there’s little reason to worry about the wellbeing of your child if he or she is slow to begin speaking, researchers have found that babies, in fact, understand language a lot sooner than you might think.
According to recent studies, babies can recognise their native language at only a few hours old, and can differentiate between theirs, and foreign languages. This indicates that, as opposed to what experts previously thought, your baby began absorbing language while he or she was still in the womb.
Your baby will have developed his or her sensory mechanisms for hearing at roughly 30 weeks in the womb, and so this new research demonstrates that your baby is listening to your speech for approximately 10 weeks before he or she is even born, and they can demonstrate what they have heard at birth!
According to Patricia Kuhl, co-author of the study and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, you play a vital role in influencing the wellness of your baby’s linguistic and brain development, as ‘The vowel sounds in her [the mother’s] speech are the loudest units and the foetus locks onto them’.
For the study, the researchers investigated 40 American and Swedish infants aged 30 hours old, and measured their responses to native and foreign vowel sounds. Researchers measured the reaction of each baby by recording how long they sucked on a dummy that had been wired to a computer. The length of time an infant sucks on a dummy changing for familiar sounds and unfamiliar sounds indicates they have learnt the difference between them, because the baby has only heard one set of vowel sounds when in the womb.
The results were that babies in both countries sucked on the dummy for longer for the unfamiliar, foreign, sounds. Kuhl said the benefits of this research could come from insights on lifelong learning as the ‘early curiosity’ of infants makes them the best learners. ‘We want to know what magic they put to work in early childhood that adults cannot’ says Kuhl, in order to help older people soak up information.