Fetal Language Processing: A New Discovery in Neuroscience

A recent study suggests that fetuses begin processing language before birth. A research team in Montreal discovered that newborns who listened to short stories in foreign languages while in the womb process those languages similarly to their native language.

A New Discovery in Neurolinguistics

This study, published in August in the journal Nature Communications Biology, is the first of its kind to use brain imaging to demonstrate what neuroscientists and psychologists have long suspected. While previous research showed that fetuses and newborns can recognize familiar sounds and rhythms, and prefer their native language immediately after birth, these findings were mostly based on behavioral indicators such as sucking patterns, head movements, or changes in heart rate, rather than direct evidence from the brain.

Anne Gallagher, a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Montreal and lead author of the study, states, “We cannot say that babies ‘learn’ language before birth.” However, we can say that babies develop an awareness of certain languages during pregnancy, which affects their brain networks at birth.

Study Details and Experimentation

The research team recruited 60 participants for the experiment, all around the 35th week of pregnancy. Among them, 39 fetuses were exposed to pre-recorded stories in French (their native language) for 10 minutes, and another 10 minutes of the same stories either in Hebrew or German at least once every two days until birth. These languages were chosen due to their phonetic and phonological characteristics that differ significantly from French and from each other, explains co-author Andrian Renée.

Between the first ten hours and three days after birth, the team observed how the newborns’ brains reacted to German, Hebrew, and French using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a non-invasive imaging technique that measures changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain.

Exciting Results on Newborn Language Processing

All babies in the group showed increased activity in the left temporal lobe, the brain’s language processing center, when they heard French. However, only those exposed to Hebrew or German before birth showed similar brain activation when listening to those languages.

Babies who did not hear the Hebrew or German stories before birth showed activity in brain areas associated with general sound processing and less activity in language processing areas.

The Impact of the Fetal Environment on Brain Development

The study supports the idea that a newborn’s brain is not a “blank slate,” as stated by Ana Carolina Kwan, a pediatric neurology expert and member of the Brazilian Academy of Neurology. Instead, the impact of the fetal environment on brain processing begins before birth.

It remains unclear how much prenatal exposure to a particular language is needed for babies’ brains to process it as a language. Some previous studies on the auditory environment’s impact on fetuses used prolonged exposure, while others used durations as short as 15 minutes.

Conclusion

While the study does not suggest that mothers should expose their unborn children to foreign languages to make them smarter or multilingual later, studying how prenatal language exposure affects a child’s speech development will be important for understanding speech disorders. This also adds evidence that language development begins before birth, which is crucial for doctors in detecting and addressing language delays.