Fetuses have the ability to learn a foreign language

Learning a foreign language is a difficult and frustrating task, even for adults. And it gets harder as you get older. So, if you want to learn a foreign language, it's worth starting as early as possible. And if you're about to have a baby, start speaking other languages while they're still in the womb. As strange as it may sound, researchers in the United States and Switzerland have found evidence that it's possible to start learning a foreign language before birth.

The study in question found that in the last ten weeks of gestation, fetuses hear their mothers' conversations, and once they are born, they are able to demonstrate that they were listening the entire time.

To define the scope of this research, forty infants, both boys and girls, approximately thirty hours old, were analyzed. These babies were exposed to different vowel sounds unique to English and Swedish—specifically, the "e" sound in "sweet" and the "eu" sound in "oeuf." The babies responded to each sound according to how hard they sucked on their pacifiers, and this force was measured using a computer connected to the infants.

In each group, the babies sucked more vigorously when they heard the vowel related to the foreign language. Thus, the North American babies responded more strongly to the sounds of the Swedish language, and the Swedes, in turn, to the sounds of the English language. These results indicate that babies are born with the ability to differentiate sounds from various languages and are curious enough to explore an unfamiliar language, according to Patricia Kuhl, one of the researchers responsible for the study and co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.

Kuhl argues that sounds are shown to babies during the last ten weeks of pregnancy because, during this period, their auditory systems are fully formed. Thus, this system functions only as a means of listening, but it also enables babies to register these sounds and, later, remember them.

However, if you think exposing your child to an intensive language course during this period might be beneficial, you might want to consider this further, as the study also shows that this does more harm than good. Babies born to bilingual mothers, for example, show that they can learn two or more languages, but the skill is acquired through natural exposure, not through constant exposure to audio in a foreign language.

In this regard, Christine Moon, the study's primary author and a psychology professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, emphasizes that fetuses spend most of their time in a state of sleep, and it cannot be said that regular extra stimulation, especially loud stimulation from a speaker outside the womb, can disrupt this sleep process in any way. Moon also emphasizes that she also lacks sufficient data to confirm that excessive sound can interfere with the ability to hear and make connections through the auditory cortex. This refers not only to the ability to understand sounds, but also to the ability to extract meaning from them.

To broaden the scope of the study, deaf mothers were also included, who use sign language as their primary means of communication, since their babies are not constantly exposed to sound. Christine Moon emphasizes that there is absolutely no difference in the process of acquiring a foreign language once the fetuses are born, as babies learn to understand spoken speech and learn to use it, doing so at relatively the same rate as other babies who were exposed to sounds from the womb.

Other experts argue that the way we understand speech, through rhythm, for example, goes beyond simply understanding individual words. Thus, what babies are hearing is the rhythm of human speech patterns, according to Ann Pettito, scientific director of the Brain Language Laboratory at Gallaudet University, a school focused on the deaf and hard of hearing.

Thus, rhythm is what allows us to understand a language and break it down into its components. This is why one cannot distinguish words in a foreign language when one first hears it, and it is also the reason why it sounds like a single, flowing noise.

Christine Moon hopes to soon be able to confirm the team's findings with future research and use other sounds from different languages and also different sounds, such as the letter R, to further expand on the fascinating discoveries made by her study so far.