First 5 Hours of Birth Reveals Babies' Ability to Differentiate Between Language Sounds

In recent research, researchers revealed details of babies' mindbogglingly rapid learning process involving language sounds, beginning in the first few hours of birth.

Frequently, babies are thought of as black canvases that have little ability to learn during their first few weeks of life. However, newborns begin to process language and speech quite early, a ScienceAlert report specified.

Even while babies are in their mother's womb, they learn to discern voices and some speech sounds. At birth, they prefer speech sounds over other non-language sound types.

The team of Cognitive Neuroscience Professor Guillaume Thierry from Bangor University collaborated with a group of researchers in China who fitted babies' heads with a standard cap covered with sophisticated light emitting devices developed to gauge slight changes in the levels of oxygen in the brains of the babies.

Essentially, detectors in the cap could help scientists determine which brain parts were active over time.

Vowels Played Backwards

The procedure, which is completely safe and painless, was performed within three hours of the babies' birth. It only needed the baby to wear a tiny elastic cap to shine minute infrared lights, essentially heat radiation, through the head.

This suits the standard practice in several cultures:: wrapping newborns in a close-fitting blanket to pacify them, soothing the transition from the womb's comfort to the autonomous physical existence's wild world.

As indicated in the Nature Human Behavior journal, within three hours from birth, all babies were exposed to pairs of sounds that most scientists would predict they should be able to determine. Such sounds included vowels like "o," and these same vowels were played backward.

Difference Between Forwards and Backwards Vowels

Typically, reversed speech is quite different from normal or forward speech, although, in the case of isolated vowels, such a difference is subtle.

In fact, in this research, the researchers discovered that adult listeners could only differentiate between two instances 70 percent of the time.

What surprised the study investigators was that newborns could not differentiate forwards and backward vowels right away after birth since they didn't find any difference between brain signals collected in every case during the first three hours of birth.

The hindsight, wrote Thierry on The Conversation where this report first came out, is that "We should not have been surprised" considering the subtleness of such a difference.

Nonetheless, the professor said they were stunned to discover that newborns began to differentiate between the "forwards and backward" vowels after listening to such sounds for five hours.

The 'Embodiment Theory'

The researchers said they can also consider the findings in the context of the trendy concept of present neuroscience, specifically "embodiment theory."

Essentially, an embodiment is a notion that one's thoughts and mental operations are not pre-programmed, nor do they operate mysteriously from some inherent genetic code, although instead build upon direct experience of the world around, through sensory channels that begin operating from birth, such as smelling, tasting, touching, seeing, and hearing.

Even though the brain has a predisposition to learn according to its function and organization defined by the genetic code inherited from parents, it can feel as well as the environment as soon as it is born, which helps the internal representations of the whole world instantaneously.

Related information about how babies communicate is shown on the Oprah Winfrey Network's YouTube video:

Check out more news and information on Babies in Science Times.