Posted on 03/12/2019 10:30:30 AM PDT by huldah1776
Jan. 3, 2013 -- Sometimes she just tells him about her day. Other times, Ruthie W. rubs her pregnant belly and tells her future son that she can’t wait to meet him (which should be any day now).
And a new study shows that he not only hears his mom, but may understand her and is already learning language from her.
“I talk to him all the time, even when I am in stores shopping for a layette and other things we will need once he is born,” says the New York City-based cosmetic executive. “People probably think I am crazy if they overhear me!”
Far from it.
In fact, she is giving her son a foundation for language development.
The new research suggests that babies began to absorb language when they are inside the womb during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy -- which is earlier than previously held. Newborns can actually tell the difference between their mother’s native tongue and foreign languages just hours after they are born.
“The main message for new moms is that their babies are listening and learning and remembering during the last stages of pregnancy. Their brains do not wait for birth to start absorbing information,” says study author Patricia K. Kuhl, PhD. She is the Bezos Family Foundation endowed chair in early childhood learning and a professor of speech and hearing sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.
How can researchers tell?
Kuhl and colleagues used a high-tech pacifier that was connected to a computer that measured infants' reactions to sounds. The study included 80 infants who were, on average, about 30 hours old and from Tacoma, Wash., and Stockholm, Sweden. They listened to vowel sounds in their native language and a foreign tongue while sucking on the pacifier.
Vowels are the loudest units in speech. The number of times they suck on the pacifier indicates which vowel sounds attracted their attention. Babies sucked longer for foreign languages than their native tongue in both countries, the study showed.
Building Blocks of Language “The mother's voice can be heard because it is amplified by her body," Kuhl says.
Sorry, Dad. The father's voice cannot be heard in the womb, she says.
“Mothers shouldn't try putting earphones on their bellies and playing music because it's already noisy in there,” she says. “Learning the mother's voice and her vowels happens naturally as the mothers speak,” she says.
“Expectant moms should have confidence that their developing baby is making sense out of the sounds that she is providing for the baby,” says another study author, Christine Moon, PhD. She is a psychologist at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. “This is how we launch off into language.”
The sound of their mom’s voice is also associated with movement. “The mom moves when she talks, and her diaphragm is moving when she talks, and we think that this pairing may be useful and may help make the sound more salient."
Their findings appear in the journal Acta Paediatrica.
Speech pathologists like New York City’s Melissa Wexler Gurfein are excited about the findings.
“Really what it is saying is that infants are learning and tuning into the speech patterns of their first exposed language(s) earlier than was originally thought,” she tells WebMD. “This may suggest the importance of the mother not only to talk during the last trimester of pregnancy but to continue to talk to her newborn from the moment of birth to help facilitate language development. “
David Mendez, MD, says that the best thing that expectant moms can do for themselves and their baby is to maintain a stress- and chemical-free environment. He is a neonatologist at Miami Children's Hospital. “Talk to your baby as much as possible in a calm and relaxing way,” he says. Avoid screaming, yelling and other violent language.
The study is “fascinating,”says Amos Grunebaum, MD. He is the director of obstetrics at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City. “People thought that newborns don’t learn until they are born, but this well-conceived study that shows that fetuses can learn while in utero,” he says. “We knew they could hear sounds, but we can teach fetuses.”
Natalie Meirowitz, MD, agrees that the study is fascinating, but she is concerned that some moms may take it to the extreme and start purchasing Rosetta Stone and other language tapes to give their baby a leg up. She is the chief of maternal and fetal medicine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y.
“We are learning a lot more about how sensitive the fetus is and how much influence stimuli coming from the mom have on the fetus,” she says. “We have known for a long time that fetuses hear outside noises and noises coming from the mother,” she says. But “I don’t think this means moms should get language tapes and teach children different languages while they are in the womb.”
WebMD Health News Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD on January 03, 2013
"The new research suggests that babies began to absorb language when they are inside the womb during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy -- which is earlier than previously held. Newborns can actually tell the difference between their mother’s native tongue and foreign languages just hours after they are born."
Tell the murdering clinicians the babies can hear them. Tell the moms that their baby already knows their voice.
Tell the moms that their baby knows she is about to murder it!
My mama was a big believer in dancing while pregnant. She said it helped the baby develop rhythm.
I haven’t missed a beat since.
So will she be dumped from her Bezos funder university chair or are the infanticidal maniacs going to boycott Amazon and the Washington Compost?
Way back when Funky Winkerbean was funny and clever and not morose, one of the characters, their English teacher, was pregnant. She said her child would be cultured and played only classical music at home and in the car and read aloud fromthe Brontes because research showed pre born infants learn from their beginnings. Unfortunately, Tim Batiuk had the child in her womb thinking lyrics from AC DC.
That explains AOC’s lying character. Her mom must have been listening to Hitlery’s speeches when she was prego..
We knew this already; John the Baptist leapt in his mother’s womb when he heard Mary’s voice. He knew who he was, and who Mary was. He had a name and a personhood.
Tell the DemonRAT party in support of “murdering” infants up to birth!! BTW, they don’t give a damn.
It goes far beyond this.
I can tell what the mother thought of the father while working with the child that was in the mother’s womb, even though that child is now 60 to 70 years old.
Over 50% of the lesbians I have worked with... (at least a hundred in all) the mother was very angry st the father when she was pregnant with the now lesbian daughter.
It’s about perceptual programming eventd.
I was in a tour band in the late 70’s. One lead singer was pregnant. The kid was absorbing loud music most nights of the week, including the mom’s singing.
That baby, grown and around 20-24 years old wrote 5 songs on Christine Aguilera’s first album and wrote a hit for Cher, Woman’s World. Plus other songs.
But they aren’t humans when in the womb!
Talk about science deniers!
Last evening I was doing a lecture at UConn Medical in Farmington CT. A woman about 30 yrs old volunteered for a demonstration.
I had her stand in front of the group with her eyes closed, I walked 15 feet from her and touched a memory stored in her soul and it knocked her over backwards. I merely touched a memory of her mother’s when she was in her mother’s womb. Her father did not want a baby.
Hush up, how’s a person supposed to get any sleep around here? It’s nap time.
8n a Saturday workshop demonstration, a woman complained of pain in her hips. I walked through her soul memories and felt the severe pain at her birth. I commented. “It feels like you were a breach baby.” She replied that was correct.
I read in reputable sources where
this is a bunch of hooey.
I initially read that as ‘he had
a name and a password.’
Just a child of my times.
wow. did the anger continue through childhood? I wonder if it was also hormonal or lack of the love reaction, too?
hmmm. I think stress during pregnancy can cause a child to be predisposed to PTSD. Causes those hippo neurons to be concentrated instead of pleasantly elongated. Love neuroscience, BTW.
What percentage of the people you worked with suffer from PTS, too?
That’s right! I was trying to figure out how old John was. Mary was there for 3 months and he hadn’t been born during that time.
wow. How have you been? Your understanding shows how miraculous we are from conception.
My sister is five years younger than I am, and we've had interesting conversations about what could have caused her to enter the world with the feeling she needed to ask permission to exist. My theory was that during the days of my conception and early childhood, my parents went from being happy newlyweds to alcoholic father and fearful mother. By the time my sister was conceived, the tension was well established.
I told her I thought perhaps she had picked up the ‘vibes’ from inside the womb and the unpleasant tension was 'baked' into her during her time in the womb.
I was only guessing at the time but it made sense. Might be something to it!
I work with people who have physical and psychological medical issues to find the original cause of the problem. Specifically I read the stored memories in their soul to determine the perceptual programming event that created the personality attribute or immune system suppression.
Memories are not stored in the physical body. They are stored in the soul which is about 30 feet in diameter around the physical body. And yes, memories begin at conception...
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