“While a female Patagonian is with child, all disagreeable objects are kept from her; she is awakened by music; they study to divert her with amusements most suitable to her taste; her mind is brightened with joy, without allowing her to grow slothful for want of action, she has exercise…”
Journal of a Voyage Round the World in the Dolphin, Anonymous (1767)
It has long been suspected that unborn children are stimulated by sounds from outside the womb. A great deal of research has gone into what kinds of noises have an effect, and into whether these effects are always beneficial. Most of this research has centred on music as a significant stimulant, but there has also been some study into the spoken word and the effect it has on a child in the womb.
Read on to find out what your baby can hear while in the womb and whether reading to him or her will help with learning later in life.
Repetitious sounds are particularly comforting to children. If a certain word or simple phrase is repeated it will often calm a foetus and this same sound will usually have the same effect once the child is born.
Similarly, the tone and flow of a particular voice, usually the mothers’, will become recognised and therefore comforting, and, again, this will have the same effect after birth. You can imagine that such repetition of particular sounds and tone might be something easily reached through choosing the same book to read aloud every night during pregnancy.
But beyond this rather vague idea of ‘comforting’, few solid conclusions on the benefits of spoken word have been reached.
Language is a particularly interesting area. Every language is made up of lots of different sounds. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can be distinguished from others like it. Different languages have different phonemes and/or use the same ones but in different ways. Learning how your language ‘sounds’ is an important part of learning to speak. For an unborn child, it is generally agreed that hearing the sounds that make up your spoken language before birth, will speed along speech development after birth. Similarly, babies are usually able to recognise their native language over a foreign one and this often leads to positive outcomes, such as better feeding.
So how early should you think about talking and reading to your child, and should you go for nursery rhymes or Tolstoy?
Recent research has shown that foetuses hear and remember music played to them at just 20 weeks. So that answers the first question!
Synaptic connections in the brain
The brain’s early development is incredibly intense: up to 250,000 cells are formed every minute and these make a staggering 1.8 million new connections per second. Some argue that exposure to a wide range of sounds make a baby’s brain form more complex connections more quickly. Reinforcing connections through use will help them to develop and last longer in the brain.
Scientists agree that experiences during the later stages of pregnancy are particularly important and may have a huge influence on brain development. Habituation, a very simple kind of memory, can be detected in the womb from 22 weeks. Ten weeks later, the foetus will show conditioning- a state when a certain stimulus, a noise for example, is learnt as a signal for another event, like a poke. At this same stage, scientists have tested for memories of particular sounds and tones, like a piece of music or a mother’s voice.
These are all indicators of the foetus’ ability to learn from a very young age. This suggests that it’s well worth the effort of speaking to your unborn child. As for what to read it, there’s no hard evidence that one book will be better than another, although there are a couple of logical leaps of faith we can make…
- reading something that encapsulates the rhythm and metre of your native tongue might bring comfort and security when the child recognises his or her language once born;
- reading something that’s more varied than your daily chatter might inspire more complex connections to be made in the rapidly growing brain of your baby.
(Thanks to memotions for the image)
Wonderful post – informative and inspiring. There’s no question in my mind that babies begin learning when they’re in the womb. In the Indian epic Mahabharatha set thousands of years ago – prince Abhimanyu picks up the nuances of an intricate battle technique from the womb, as his father Arjuna explains it to his mother. Later, when he actually faces a situation when he has to engage in that very kind of warfare( known as Chakravyuh), he remembers it from his womb days. Any parent who had been speaking and reading to their child since birth or earlier will attest to the fact that the baby responded to their voice and tone and how reading helped them bond in a unique way. For me, it’s the most joyful shared experience and activity to do with my 3 year old. I started talking to her when before she was born and have been reading to her since birth – and boy! do I love how much she loves it!
Great that you liked the post. Our thinking seems to be very much along the same lines
This certainly gives pause for thought. I’m suddenly faintly concerned about my Eastenders habit, and the fact that the baby currently listens to more Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave than it does
Mozart. (Though I did have Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony playing in the background while I was cooking the other day.)
I wonder if it can still hear if I’m listening through headphones – in which case it’s fine, as my husband doesn’t countenance my Eastenders addiction, and I have to watch it on i-player, silently.
Either way, I will attempt to tone down the angry/ depressed/ murderous/ suicidal lyrics, and focus on happy things. (I’m not even sure that the Leningrad symphony is terribly appropriate. It’s very violent.) I’ll also start reading to it from War and Peace (the peace sections, at least . . .. ) Actually, if it’s a girl, it’s being named for the heroine, so perhaps it’s appropriate.