We Learn Our Language in the Womb

Posted by Johnny Cat in Baby & Kids on November 5, 2009 at 9:04 pm


No wonder learning a new language can be more difficult the older you get.  We were learning our individual languages before we were even born!  That’s what researchers revealed in a release today by Current Biology.

It seems that fetuses not only warm to the sound of mother’s voice as they gestate, they also are being programmed in the direct patterns inherent in certain languages.  By the time we are born, our dialect is determined.

Wermke’s team recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old. That analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the newborns’ cry melodies, based on their mother tongue.

Specifically, French newborns tend to cry with a rising melody contour, whereas German newborns seem to prefer a falling melody contour in their crying. Those patterns are consistent with characteristic differences between the two languages, Wermke said.

ScienceDaily has a brief story about this new knowledge: Link

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14 comments to "We Learn Our Language in the Womb"

  1. pwscott
    November 5th, 2009 at 9:46 pm

    That is too freaky. We could breed a world of evil genius' with at least 5 months of mental training in the womb.

  2. Padraig
    November 6th, 2009 at 6:07 am

    So what exactly happens if the expecting couple speak different languages? Or does only the language spoken by the prospective mother matter?

  3. Kaboom
    November 6th, 2009 at 6:20 am

    In what language do the late-term abortees protest their fate?

  4. Jim
    November 6th, 2009 at 9:23 am

    I simply cannot fathom the type of person who works every day at disposing unwanted babies. Then again few of us could understand the mind set of Nazi death camp personell.

  5. Chago
    November 6th, 2009 at 10:31 am

    I'm sorry but a 60 person sample isn't even close to proving anything.

  6. Chago
    November 6th, 2009 at 10:43 am

    How did they control the experiment? What about babys removed from their family to a different younger home?
    This is lame

  7. Humos
    November 6th, 2009 at 10:56 am

    It's a wonderful excuse for lazy mono-monolingual people for NOT even trying to learn another language.

  8. ronald
    November 6th, 2009 at 11:10 am

    IMO, if you are against abortion, you should also be anti-war, anti-death-penalty, pro-universal health care, and pro-civil rights (including right of consenting adults of any gender to marry and lead their own lives).

  9. Flux
    November 6th, 2009 at 1:56 pm

    If you're also against abortion, you should be anti-masturbation for males. All those wasted half people...omg, teh carnage!

  10. emmiline
    November 7th, 2009 at 2:39 am

    Flux- agree!
    --

    if *you're* not the one having the abortion done, then maybe you should mind your own business.

  11. Chicago Translator
    November 7th, 2009 at 4:34 am

    This is an amazing discovery. This only proves that they can hear us even while they are still in their mother's womb. Then it is really true that we can read them good books and let them listen to good music even before they are born. Thank you for this post.

  12. Cola
    November 7th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    I don't know that you can say one's dialect is determined at birth. A friend of mine was born in Japan to Japanese parents and came to the U.S. at four years of age (becoming a citizen just a couple of years ago). It was hard for me to believe she was fluent in Japanese, until I heard her speak it over the phone with her father, because her English is completely unaccented.

    This is just one story, but I remember learning about the apprehension of language in my linguistics classes, and I just think the way you've boiled it down here is a little too simplistic. For instance, the real test of whether a dialect is "fixed" by birth would be to take an infant born in another country (China, for instance) with entirely different syntax from the one in which they were raised and see how easily they learned their mother tongue at the high school level compared to their (U.S. born) peers.

  13. Cola
    November 7th, 2009 at 2:29 pm

    Chago- you're right, it's extremely preliminary, but we all know how lay people tend to exaggerate the tentative conclusions of even the most qualified of studies. More likely this is just more evidence for the way we're wired as human beings to learn language. Even as embryos, our half developed brains are picking up on linguistic cues.

    I doubt this proves language is completely learned before birth.

  14. Mouserz
    November 7th, 2009 at 6:30 pm

    Im going to start screaming obscenities in every language at my unborn son


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