Newborns whose mothers are bilingual have additional abilities

Read time: 2 min – Appeared on New Scientist

Within just a few hours of life, babies born to bilingual mothers (who have been exposed to two languages ​​in the womb) have different brain responses than babies born to monolingual mothers, says New Scientist. Indeed, they prefer to hear vowel sounds rather than non-vocal sounds and are able to distinguish different languages ​​based on their rhythm.

Previous research had shown that 4-month-olds living in bilingual homes had different patterns of brain activity, but scientists didn’t know how prenatal exposure to more than one language affected infants’ brain responses.

To answer this question, Sonia Arenillas Alcon of the University of Barcelona (Spain) and her colleagues studied 131 babies aged 1 to 3 days. All were born full term, but 53 had mothers who spoke only Spanish while another 78 were born to mothers who spoke both Spanish and Catalan.

Influence of prenatal experiences

The team exposed the newborns to a series of sounds lasting a quarter of a second each. During the experiment, electrodes placed on their scalps recorded their brain waves, a marker of brain activity that reflects how efficiently speech sounds are processed.

“Bilingual speech contains more complex sound cues than monolingual speech, making children born to mothers who speak more than one language more sensitive to sound frequency”, suggest the researchers in their article published in the journal BioRxiv. These different brain waves result from exposure to language in the womb rather than what they hear in the first days of life.

This new study shows a strong influence of prenatal experiences on language acquisition. It also highlights the problem that premature babies, who have spent less time in the womb, can face.