PsyPost reports:

Researchers have shown for the first time that newborns of monolingual mothers respond differently to playback of a carefully selected sound stimulus than newborns of bilingual mothers. The findings suggest that bilingual newborns are sensitive to a wider range of acoustic variation of speech, at the cost of being less selectively tuned in to any single language. These results underscore the importance of prenatal exposure for learning about speech.

It’s well established that babies in the womb hear and learn about speech, at least in the third trimester. For example, newborns have been shown to already prefer the voice of their mother, recognize a story that had been repeatedly told to them while in the womb, and tell apart their mother’s native language.

What wasn’t known until now was how developing fetuses learn about speech when their mother speaks to them in a mix of languages. Yet this is common: there are 3.3 billion bilingual people (43% of the population) worldwide, and in many countries, bilingualism or multilingualism is the norm.

“Here we show that exposure to monolingual or a bilingual speech has different effects at birth on ‘neural encoding’ of voice pitch and vowel sounds: that is, how information about these aspects of speech has been initially learned by the fetus,” said Dr Natàlia Gorina-Careta, a researcher at the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona, and the joint first author of a new study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“At birth, newborns from bilingual mothers appear more sensitive to a wider range of acoustic variation of speech, whereas newborns from monolingual mothers seem to be more selectively tuned to the single language they have been immersed in.” [Continue reading…]