A recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience suggests that babies who are exposed to multiple languages while in the womb may have a wider range of speech recognition abilities after they are born. Unlike babies with mothers who spoke only one language, those with bilingual mothers were found to be more sensitive to a variety of pitches rather than being tuned into a specific one. This indicates that bilingual babies begin to learn about languages differently even before they are born.
Previous research has shown that babies are able to learn about speech in the womb, with newborns preferring their mother’s voice and recognizing stories that were told to them during pregnancy. However, not much study has been done on how fetuses process speech if their mother speaks multiple languages. The researchers studied 131 sets of mothers and babies aged between 1 and 3 days old in Catalonia, where a significant portion of the population speaks both Catalan and Spanish. They used electrodes on the babies’ foreheads to measure their brain responses to speech sounds and found that bilingual babies displayed a higher sensitivity to a wider range of acoustic variations compared to monolingual babies.
The study involved mothers completing a questionnaire to indicate their language use during pregnancy. The results showed that monolingual babies were more sensitive to a specific pitch found in their mother’s language, while bilingual babies showed a more general sensitivity to all sounds. The researchers suggest that this may represent a trade-off between selectivity and efficiency in how newborns and fetuses learn about pitch and speech. They emphasize the importance of prenatal language exposure in shaping the neural encoding of speech sounds at birth.
While the study highlights the impact of prenatal language exposure on speech recognition in newborns, the researchers note that the languages spoken during pregnancy are unlikely to have a significant impact on how babies learn about speech after birth. Thus, both monolingual and bilingual parents need not worry about the long-term effects of their speech on their children. Future research may focus on how a bilingual language environment influences sound encoding during the early years of life to provide further insights into this issue.
Overall, the study contributes to our understanding of how prenatal language exposure influences infant speech processing abilities, showing that bilingual babies may have a broader range of speech recognition skills compared to their monolingual counterparts. This research sheds light on the complex ways in which babies learn about languages before they are even born and provides valuable insights into the effects of language exposure on infants’ neural responses to speech sounds.
