Mother tongue Before Birth.

Introduction

Babies learn language incredibly quickly during their first year of life, but it has largely been a mystery how the brain primes them before birth to learn a particular language or mother tongue.

Babies learn a lot from their mothers before they are born, but according to a new study, they can also learn their own body language from their mother when she is having a conversation.

Infants respond in different ways when they hear their native language, suggesting that hearing language in utero before birth may aid language learning.

A new study involving experiments with newborns found that they are already familiar with their mother tongue, suggesting that language learning begins before birth.

According to a new study published in Science Advances, the brain waves of newborns resemble the language they often encounter in the womb.

These findings provide the most compelling evidence to date that language experience shapes the functional organization of the infant's brain before birth, between 1 and 5 months of gestation.

Between five and seven months of pregnancy, the baby fetus begins to hear sounds outside the womb, so within days of birth, infants prefer their mother's voice and native language.

Babies can also recognize rhythms and melodies heard in utero, and prenatal exposure to music can help them develop musical abilities.

For a child, the first year after birth is critical for language development, which is why by the first birthday, children are proficient in understanding their mother tongue.

According to Professor Judith Gervin, newborn babies can recognize their mother's voice and prefer it to the voices of other women, and they can also recognize the language their mother spoke during pregnancy.

To confirm this, Gervain and his colleagues conducted further research in which they studied the brain activity of 49 children with French-speaking mothers, ranging in age from one day to five days.

Each newborn was fitted with a small cap with 10 electrodes placed near the areas of the brain that could perceive any speech.

The team then played a recording that began with a 3-minute silence followed by 7-minute excerpts from the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears in English, French, and Spanish in varying order.

When the children listened to the French audio, the team noted an increase in brain signals associated with long-term speech and language learning, a signal linked to speech perception and processing, which decreased when the children listened to other languages. were

Conclusion:

The researchers concluded from this study that babies are not only familiar with the mother's voice before birth, but they are also familiar with their mother tongue which is heard by the mothers during pregnancy.