The study appears in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.įor more about pregnancy, try the US National Library of Medicine. ![]() You can speak to other people, or to your foetus if you like." "Be aware that the foetus can hear something from the outside world and learn from it," study co-author Huotilainen said. What can parents do with this information? It's really quite amazing that the foetal brain has that capacity." "The fact that learning from frequently presented sounds occurs while infants are still in the womb means that language learning does not begin on Day 1 at the moment of birth, but while the infant listens to sounds in the uterus. Patricia Kuhl, a speech researcher and director of the University of Washington's NSF Science of Learning Centre, praised the study. Babies begin to hear about halfway through pregnancy, she said. Huotilainen said it appears that the type of learning revealed by the study probably happens in the late part of pregnancy, although this hasn't been studied. "They were able to process the word better, and also they were able to detect changes in the word better." Those who'd heard it before "showed an enhanced reaction to this specific word," Huotilainen said. Sometimes the recordings presented the word with a different middle syllable ("to") or pronounced differently.Īfter birth, the researchers used scans to test the activity in the brains of all the babies when they heard the word. It follows all the rules of the Finnish language."įrom the 29th week of pregnancy until birth, about half of the 33 pregnant women in the study listened to recordings of the word repeated hundreds of times. It has three syllables, and we chose such a long word to make it challenging for the small brains to find the changes and give them something difficult to learn," Huotilainen said. 37 synonyms for memory: recall, mind, retention, ability to remember, powers of recall, powers of. ![]() "It is a so-called 'pseudoword' that is important for research. ![]() The researchers tested the memory of Finnish foetuses by exposing them to a single word – "tatata" – that means nothing in the Finnish language. "There is already some evidence that foetuses can learn, and that babies can remember songs or passages of speech from the foetal period," Huotilainen said.
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