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

Previous works on the study of how babies and young children acquire their first language (in the case of monolingual acquisition) and their first languages (in the case of bilingual and multilingual acquisition) have long been showing the importance of language exposure. That is, language acquisition proceeds because infants are exposed to language input, among other relevant factors (e.g., human genetic endowment). The present investigation takes a step forward (or backwards in terms of the infant’s chronology) in exploring whether this is so prenatally, too.  

The study shows a carefully controlled methodology pertaining to their participant selection, the design of the experimental conditions and the data collection procedure. The authors take into consideration language typological distance and language familiarity, as well as the length of linguistic units (as measured by means of theta versus gamma frequency bands) to offer a detailed account of what the newly born is able to process. Infants successfully identify the language they have been exposed to prenatally (i.e., French) and distinguish it from unfamiliar languages regardless of whether they are prosodically similar (i.e., Spanish) or more distant (i.e., English). Furthermore, infants are sensitive in this very initial state to larger prosodic units (i.e., syllables, the theta band) rather than to smaller ones (i.e., phonemes, the gamma band) as they are the ones that they are exposed to in the language they have heard prenatally. The effect of language experience before birth proves to be a determining factor in language processing and language acquisition already during the very first days after birth. 

This study leaves the door open to consider other issues that would help complete the information we have on how the brain develops and processes language, for example, by analyzing tonal languages in which intonation patterns involve a change in meaning that does not take place in non–tonal languages like the three under consideration in this study. Furthermore, it is still to be investigated whether the facilitation effects reported here for language can also be extended to other domains (e.g., music).