It's no secret that young children acquire new languages with impressive ease. What is less well understood are the neural mechanisms that underlie this remarkable brain plasticity.
Now, new research from the University of Padua in Italy has shown that exposure to languages alters the shape of the infant brain, even before we are born.
"Hearing is operational from the 24th to 28th week of gestation, so fetuses can hear during the last trimester of pregnancy," Judit Gervain, senior author on the paper, told Newsweek.
"What moms say is transmitted to the baby in utero, even if the mom speaks to other people. So all moms produce enough speech for their babies to learn from while in the womb just by going about their everyday, regular business."
Previous studies have shown that newborns can recognize music that was played to them while they were still in the womb. They can even recognize their mothers voice. But recognizing language is even more surprising.
"We definitely were [surprised by our results]," Gervain said. "Since sounds in the womb are filtered by maternal tissues, the individual sounds of language are suppressed, and what comes through to the fetus is mainly the prosody, i.e. the melody and rhythm of language."
In their study, published in the journal Science Advances on November 22, the team investigated how exposure to languages in newborn babies, aged 1 to 5 days, affected their brain activity.
First, they measured their resting state brain activity, after being exposed to three minutes of silence. Then they heard speech in three different languages—in French, Spanish and English—in 7-minute blocks. Lastly, their brain activity was measured again for three minutes of silence.
What they found was that exposure to different languages resulted in an increase in brain activity, which persisted after the 7-minute speech period. They also found that exposure to the language the babies had heard their parents speak while they were in the womb—which in this case was French—resulted in the most significant increases in prolonged brain activity.
"We show learning as it unfolds," Gervain said. "We find that the newborn brain's activity is modified in real time, even several minutes after hearing speech in the native, i.e. prenatally heard language.
"Our results show that the young brain is extremely plastic and can readily be shaped by experience. This is particularly true of language, where experience begins even before birth."
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Pandora Dewan is a Senior Science Reporter at Newsweek based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on science, health ... Read more
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