Why it pays to be a chatty mum: Babies start learning language BEFORE birth, study finds

If you’re a mom-to-be, talking as much as possible could give your baby a head start on learning to talk.

Indeed, new research has found that your unborn son or daughter will start learning the language you speak even before they are born.

In experiments, researchers found increased activity in the brains of newborns when they heard the language they were most often exposed to in utero.

The study did not examine exactly when babies become receptive to spoken language while still in the womb, although it is well known that a fetus begins to hear sounds near the end of the second trimester and at the beginning of the third.

Future mothers – and fathers too – should therefore not be afraid to discuss, and even to speak directly to their baby bump.

The new study was carried out by researchers from Paris Descartes University in France and the University of Padua in Italy.

“The prenatal period lays the foundation for further language development,” they say in their article.

“These results provide the most compelling evidence to date that language experience already shapes the functional organization of the infant brain, even before birth.”

We already know that between five and seven months of gestation, the fetus can begin to hear sounds from outside the uterus.

Even earlier – as early as 16 weeks – unborn babies can even respond to music played outside the womb, by moving their mouths and tongues, a shocking 2015 study found.

Previous research has also shown that the sound of a mother’s voice can stimulate a premature baby’s brain development while in an incubator.

Newborns prefer their mother’s voice over other female voices and show a preference for the language spoken by their mother during pregnancy over other languages, other studies have found.

However, the exact “neural mechanisms” that enable the developing brain to learn from linguistic experience remain “poorly understood”, according to the team.

For this study, 33 newborns whose mothers were French native speakers were monitored by encephalography (EEG) at the Robert Debré hospital in Paris between one and five days after birth.

EEG involves a network of small sensors attached to the scalp that pick up electrical signals produced by the brain.

While their brain waves were monitored, the researchers played them the gentle sound of the classic children’s story, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Excerpts from the story were performed in three languages: French (native language), Spanish (an unknown language with a similar rhythm) and English (an unknown language with a different rhythm).

After listening to their native language – French – as opposed to Spanish or English, the newborns showed “enhanced neural oscillations” linked to language processing abilities, the researchers found.

This suggests that babies were already familiar with the primary language spoken when they were in the womb, which the researchers believe came from their mothers, as well as the mother’s verbal interactions with other people.

“The results provide the most compelling evidence to date that linguistic experience already shapes the functional organization of the infant brain, even before birth,” the authors say in their article.

“Exposure to speech results in rapid but long-lasting changes in neural dynamics…increasing infants’ sensitivity to previously heard stimuli.”

Mothers would give their babies’ learning a boost by talking as much as they can while pregnant, but it shouldn’t be difficult, according to study author Professor Judit Gervain.

“All mothers produce enough speech so that their babies can learn in the womb simply by going about their regular daily routines – talking to neighbors, friends, work colleagues and family members,” she said. she declared.

Professor Gervain added that it “also makes sense” for mothers to speak directly to their babies, particularly during the third trimester, when their hearing skills are as good as they will ever be in the womb.

Although prenatal language experience “scaffolds” or supports language development, it does not determine developmental outcomes, she explained.

In other words, babies who don’t have much exposure to language in the womb don’t necessarily experience developmental delay as children.

The study was published in the journal Scientists progress.