It is often said that it is recommended that the mother and father talk to the baby who waits patiently in the belly to begin to somehow begin to bond with him and also for the baby to begin to know their voices. It is also said that it can be good to put music on them to start stimulating them and so that later, at birth, they already have music that they can listen to and that they like and calm them down.
Well, a recent study shows that yes, it is advisable to do all this before the child is born because Newborn babies are able to remember words they hear frequently before birth.
The study was conducted in Finland and was done with 33 mothers. Half of them had the indication that, from the 29th week of pregnancy, put their baby, inside the belly, a recording in which they could listen a word repeated hundreds of times, sometimes with some variation. The word chosen was "tatata", which means nothing in Finnish, and sometimes "tatota" was heard.
They chose this word for being long and for babies to find it difficult to find the same changes with respect to the rest of the language. It is a word that does not exist, but that could perfectly exist in Finnish, as it follows the rules of the language.
After birth the researchers did brain scans to babies to evaluate what was the activity that occurred when hearing that word. They observed that the children who had been hearing her reacted more than children who had never heard the word. They also saw that when there was a change in the word they heard, they also detected it better than the other children.
Minna Huotilainen, co-author of the study said:
We believe this shows how well the brain adapts to sounds at that age. It is a sign of a very early learning of language, or an adaptation to the sounds they hear ... A newborn baby is not an empty canvas, but has already learned how his mother and other relatives speak.
The researchers' doubt is knowing when the learning really occurred. Babies begin to hear between the 20th and 25th week of gestation, however it is not known when they are able to start memorizing what they hear. The children in the study began to hear the word "tatata" with 29 weeks of gestation, but they may not begin to learn it until the end of pregnancy.
With this data it is recommended do what has always been said, talk to him, explain things to him, start treating him already like the human being that he will soon be and all this so that he later has more ease with language but, above all, so that parents already have a small relationship that continues after being parents.
