Language experienced in utero affects vowel perception after birth: a two‐country study

Abstract

Aims To test the hypothesis that exposure to ambient language in the womb alters phonetic perception shortly after birth. This two-country study aimed to see if neonates demonstrated prenatal learning by how they responded to vowels in a category from their native language and another nonnative language, regardless of how much postnatal experience the infants had. Method A counterbalanced experiment was conducted in Sweden (n=40) and the USA (n=40) using Swedish and English vowel sounds. The neonates (mean postnatal age = 33 hrs) controlled audio presentation of either native or nonnative vowels by sucking on a pacifier, with the number of times they sucked their pacifier being used to demonstrate what vowel sounds attracted their attention. The vowels were either the English /i/ or Swedish /y/ in the form of a prototype plus 16 variants of the prototype. Results The infants in the native and nonnative groups responded differently. As predicted, the infants responded to the unfamiliar nonnative language with higher mean sucks. They also sucked more to the nonnative prototype. Time since birth (range: 7–75 hours) did not affect the outcome. Conclusion The ambient language to which foetuses are exposed in the womb starts to affect their perception of their native language at a phonetic level. This can be measured shortly after birth by differences in responding to familiar vs. unfamiliar vowels.

The Sooner, the Better

“…Research shows that children are sensitive to language even prenatally (Moon et al, 2013;Partanen et al, 2013), yet in the first few months after a child is born, general language experiences are more likely to make a difference than reading aloud. However, as no negative effects of a very early start of reading to a child are to be expected, the sooner the better appears to be best.…”

Learned Labels Shape Pre‐speech Infants’ Object Representations

“…Importantly, however, early learning is not just perceptual: in the early days, weeks and months infants also acquire linguistic representations. Even newborns can discriminate their native language from a nonnative language (Moon, Lagercrantz, & Kuhl, 2013) and detect grammatical categories in maternal speech (Shi, Werker, & Morgan, 1999). By eight months, infants can detect linguistic structure and segment words by tracking co‐occurrence statistics in the speech sounds they hear (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996).…”

Mother’s voice and heartbeat sounds elicit auditory plasticity in the human brain before full gestation

“…auditory | brain | mother's voice | heartbeat | preterm newborns O ne of the first acoustic stimuli we are exposed to before birth is the voice of the mother and the sounds of her heartbeat. As fetuses, we have substantial capacity for auditory learning and memory already in utero (1)(2)(3)(4)(5), and we are particularly tuned to acoustic cues from our mother (6)(7)(8)(9). Previous research suggests that the innate preference for mother's voice shapes the developmental trajectory of the brain (10,11).…”

“…This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. 1 To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: amir@hms.harvard.edu.…”