 |
| CREDIT: © Marina Dyakonova | Dreamstime.com |
Just
hours after they're born, babies seem to be able to tell the difference between
sounds in their native tongue and a foreign one, according to a new study that
suggests language learning begins in utero. "The mother has first dibs on
influencing the child's brain," researcher Patricia Kuhl, of the
University of Washington, said in the statement. "The vowel sounds in her
speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them." Researchers
examined 40 babies (an even mix of girls and boys) in Tacoma, Wash., and
Stockholm, Sweden. At about 30 hours old, the infants in the study listened to
vowel sounds in their native language and in foreign languages. The babies'
interest in the sounds was measured by how long they sucked on a pacifier wired
to a computer.
The
study found that, in both countries, the infants listening to unfamiliar sounds
sucked on the pacifier for longer than they did when exposed to their native
tongue, suggesting they could differentiate between the two. Lead author of the
study, Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University
in Tacoma, said the results show that fetuses can learn prenatally about the
particular speech sounds of a mother's language. "This study moves the
measurable result of experience with speech sounds from six months of age to
before birth," Moon said.
Previous
studies have indicated that babies begin to develop sound-recognition skills
while still in the womb. For example, in a 2011 study detailed in the journal
PLoS ONE, a group of women were asked to play a brief recording of a descending
piano melody in the last three weeks of their pregnancy. When the babies heard
the song again a month after birth, researchers found that the infants' hearts
slowed significantly compared with when they heard an unfamiliar song. In other
experiments described in the journal Current Biology in 2009, scientists
recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns when they were 3 days to
5 days old — 30 born into French-speaking families, 30 into German-speaking
ones. Their analysis revealed clear differences in the melodies of their cries
based on their native tongue. The new research, which will be detailed in an
upcoming issue of the journal Acta Paediatrica, could shed light on previously
unknown ways that newborns soak up information. "We want to know what
magic they put to work in early childhood that adults cannot," Kuhl said.
"We can't waste that early curiosity."
Source: Live Science
No comments:
Post a Comment