Reacción a "Reactions: language babies hear in the womb shapes their brains "

This is a very interesting study, both in terms of the findings and the method used. The research group led by Dr Gervain, from the University of Padova, has found markers of brain activity in babies that reflect the exposure they have had to their mother tongue while in their mother's womb. Specifically, they found that the rhythmic electrical activity in babies' brains after listening to recordings in their mother tongue is tuned to the syllabic rhythm of that language, suggesting that prenatal experiences fine-tune babies' ability to pick up their mother's language. 

It has long been known that intrauterine auditory experiences, such as exposure to speech or music, modulate how newborns perceive sound, including their preferences. For example, babies prefer the mother's voice to other voices. And babies born to mothers who sing daily or listen to music through loudspeakers are born with a better ability to encode the pitch of the voice. This study is an interesting contribution to the field, although we believe it is difficult to be sure that its results directly reflect the characteristics of the mother's language. To do so, it should be possible to replicate the results in babies who are native speakers of the other languages that appear in the study (Spanish and English). 

In addition, there are factors that could play a role, such as the different attention a baby pays to the mother tongue compared to others, given that the brain rhythms associated with attention are similar to those found in the study. In any case, the results of current research on the influence of prenatal auditory stimulation open up a wealth of possibilities for early interventions for babies at risk of language acquisition problems.