Language acquisition in newborns actually starts much earlier than previously thought.
In a fascinating new study, researchers have discovered that babies born to mothers who speak two languages exhibit different brain activity patterns in response to speech-like sounds compared to babies with monolingual mothers. This surprising finding suggests that exposure to multiple languages can begin influencing the brain's development for language acquisition even before birth.
We already knew that newborns have a natural preference for listening to speech and can even distinguish between different languages based on their rhythm.
However, this research sheds light on a previously unknown aspect: how prenatal exposure to multiple languages shapes the brain's response to sounds as early as the first few days of life.
This discovery builds upon prior research that showed distinct brain activity patterns in 4-month-old babies raised in bilingual households. Now, scientists are eager to understand how these early experiences with multiple languages might influence the development of other cognitive skills in these babies.
"We interpret our results under the consideration that bilingual maternal speech, as compared to monolingual, is characterized by a greater complexity in the speech sound signal, rendering newborns from bilingual mothers more sensitive to a wider range of speech frequencies without generating a particularly strong response at any of them," the authors of the study said.
"Our results contribute to an expanding body of research indicating the influence of prenatal experiences on language acquisition and underscore the necessity of including prenatal language exposure in developmental studies on language acquisition, a variable often overlooked yet capable of influencing research outcomes," said the researchers.