[lg policy] Language Lessons Start in the Womb

Thu Feb 23 16:45:07 UTC 2017

Language Lessons Start in the Womb

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
<https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/author/perri-klass-m-d/%20%20%20or%20https://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/columns/18_and_under/index.html?scp=1&sq=%22Perri%20Klass%22&st=cse>
FEB.
21, 2017

Credit Getty Images

New research is teasing out more of the profoundly miraculous process of
language learning in babies. And it turns out that even more is going on
prenatally than previously suspected.

By looking at international adoptees — babies who were adopted soon after
birth and who grow up hearing a different language than what they heard in
the womb — researchers can see how what babies hear before and soon after
birth affects how they perceive sounds, giving new meaning to the idea of a
“birth language.”

Experts have known for some time that newborns prefer to listen to voices
speaking the language that they’ve been listening to in the womb, said Anne
Cutler, a psycholinguist who is a professor at the Marcs Institute for
Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University, in Australia.

Newborns can recognize the voices they’ve been hearing for the last
trimester in the womb, especially the sounds that come from their mothers,
and prefer those voices to the voices of strangers. They also prefer other
languages with similar rhythms, rather than languages with very different
rhythms. (Newborns indicated their preferences by how long they sucked on
specially rigged pacifiers that enabled them to hear one speaker versus
another, or one language versus another.)
Audio
Dutch: tal 0:01
Play

This is the Dutch word for amount. Dr. Patricia Kuhl, University of
Washington
Audio
Korean: 달 0:01
Play

This is the Korean word for moon. Dr. Patricia Kuhl, University of
Washington

Dr. Cutler said the thinking used to be that babies didn’t actually learn
phonemes — the smallest units of sound that make up words and language,
that distinguish one word from another, as in “bag” and “tag” — until the
second six months of life.
Audio
Korean: 탈 0:01
Play

This is the Korean word for mask. Dr. Patricia Kuhl, University of
Washington

But new research, including the recent adoptee study, is challenging that
notion.

In a 2010 TED Talk, , Dr. Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington
described her experiments showing that as very young infants
<https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies>,
babies are able to distinguish all the different sounds used in all the
world’s languages. But during the second half of their first year, babies
get better at distinguishing the sounds that are used in their own
languages, and lose the ability to distinguish the sounds they aren’t
hearing. Thus, a baby growing up hearing Japanese will lose the ability to
distinguish between “la” and “ra,” while a baby growing up hearing Korean
will retain the ability to distinguish three different ways of pronouncing
a sound like “tal” that has only one way of being pronounced in Dutch.
Audio
Korean: 딸 0:01
Play

This is the Korean word for daughter. Dr. Patricia Kuhl, University of
Washington

In the latest study, published in January in Royal Society Open Science,
<http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/1/160660> Jiyoun Choi, a
doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the
Netherlands, where Dr. Cutler was the director, and her colleagues looked
at Dutch-speaking adults, some of whom had been adopted from Korea, but
none of whom spoke Korean. The researchers found that people born in Korea
and adopted as babies or toddlers by Dutch families were able to learn to
make Korean sounds significantly better than the Dutch-speaking controls
who had been born into Dutch families.
Continue reading the main story
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Recent Comments
TSV 18 hours ago

Wondering about deaf Mothers. Would it take longer for their children to
develop lingual bonds with them? Longer for their language skills...
Martha Shelley 1 day ago

Talking to your baby is very important. I see too many mothers (and
fathers) pushing babies in strollers while talking on and on to another...
Turbot 1 day ago

Do we really know that sounds can be transmitted to a baby in utero?

   - See All Comments
   - Write a comment

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It was especially interesting that this effect held not only for those who
had been adopted after the age of 17 months, when they would have been
saying some words, but also for those adopted at under 6 months. In other
words, the language heard before birth and in the first months of life had
affected both sound perception and sound production, even though the change
of language environment happened before the children started making those
sounds themselves.

Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University
who also studies infants and language acquisition, traces some of her own
interest in this subject to her experience as an adoptive mother. “My
children were adopted at birth, so they are cases of babies who had a
certain kind of experience right up until they were born and they did not
hear their birth mothers’ voices after they were born until much later,”
she said.

In a study <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3543479/>
published in 2012, Dr. Moon and her associates showed that English and
Swedish newborns in the first day or two of life responded differently to
the vowel sounds used in their native language than they did to vowel
sounds from the other language. The researchers have also looked at brain
responses in newborns, and in a study
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4373280/> published in 2015,
they showed that the babies’ brains could distinguish the mother’s voice
from a stranger’s voice in a single second of speech — the word “baby” —
but the single word was not a sufficient reward to alter the babies’
sucking behavior.

“The conclusion has always been under 6 months, they have no phonology,
they have no abstract knowledge about language,” Dr. Cutler said. But
recognizing that a phoneme is a particular sound, even as it occurs in
different places in different words, is abstract thinking, she explained.
So the research shows that even very early in life, babies’ brains are able
to distinguish patterns of sound, and apply those rules years later to the
task of learning how to produce sounds that have not been part of their
daily speech.

“This ability to generalize and to draw abstract conclusions across data is
the most important quality of the human mind,” Dr. Cutler said. “This is
what makes us human.”

Babies and children can learn new languages perfectly after birth; the
learning that goes on prenatally is still fascinating in elucidating the
processes of language and brain development. And we can help infant brain
development along naturally with the familiar rhythms of parent-child
interactions, back and forth, talking and singing and reading aloud.

“The basic message to parents is don’t get too wrapped around the axle
about preparing your extremely young infant for language,” Dr. Moon said.
“Just do those things that are really natural and easy.”

“Talk to your baby,” Dr. Cutler said. “Your baby is picking up useful
knowledge about language even though they’re not actually learning words.”
And your baby will like it: “It’s something they really love, the social
interaction of you talking with them, but they’re still storing up useful
knowledge whenever they hear speech.”

NYTimes 2/23/17

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