Amazing stuff!
"Fetuses gain the ability to hear sometime between five and seven months gestation. Previous studies had indicated that during this time, they learn to recognize the sounds of music and speaking voices they hear. But whether they really pick up on the language in either has remained unclear. So, researchers fitted one- to five-day-old newborns with electroencephalography (EEG) caps to measure their brain activity. Then they played kids’ stories in English, Spanish, and French—the last of which was their parents’ language. When the French story came at the end, the newborns’ brains reacted differently, exhibiting brain wave patterns that suggested they were already primed to learn their parent’s tongue, according to the authors.
“These results provide the most compelling evidence to date that language experience already shapes the functional organization of the infant brain, even before birth,” the team writes. ..."
From the abstract:
"Human infants acquire language with notable ease compared to adults, but the neural basis of their remarkable brain plasticity for language remains little understood. Applying a scaling analysis of neural oscillations to address this question, we show that newborns’ electrophysiological activity exhibits increased long-range temporal correlations after stimulation with speech, particularly in the prenatally heard language, indicating the early emergence of brain specialization for the native language."
Babies’ Brains Are Primed for Their Native Language Before Birth
Fig. 1. Illustration of the experimental paradigm and the analysis pipeline.
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