According to a new study, babies of multilingual mothers have a different way of processing sounds in the brains and have higher sensitivity to a wider pitch range.
The study shows how bilingual or monolingual speech could yield different effects upon birth and how fetuses initially learn such speech information.
Babies of Monolingual, Bilingual Mothers
Researcher Natàlia Gorina-Careta from the Institute of Neurosciences from the University of Barcelona, and the study's first joint author, explains that upon birth, babies of bilingual mothers are usually more sensitive to a wider acoustic speech variation range.
As for babies born to monolingual mothers, they appear more selectively tuned to a lone language that they ended up immersed in.
As part of the "Exposure to bilingual or monolingual maternal speech during pregnancy affects the neurophysiological encoding of speech sounds in neonates differently" study, the researchers examined mothers from Catalonia, Spain. Roughly 12% of the area's population are speakers of both Spanish and Catalan.
Included in the study were moms of 131 newborns, who were one- to three-days-old. The participants also included two twin pairs.
In a survey, 41% of the mothers reported to speak just one language while they were pregnant. The remaining 59% reportedly spoke two or more languages, which also included Portuguese, Arabic, Romanian, and English. Among the 41% monolingual mothers, 91% were Spanish speakers, while 9% spoke Catalan.
The researchers then studied the brain responses of the babies towards certain sounds of speech. They did so by placing electrodes over their foreheads.
The sounds comprised four different stages, namely, the /a/ that had a rising pitch, the vowel /a/ with a steady pitch, a transition, and the /o/ vowel.
Sonia Arenillas Alcón, a co-author of the study and researcher from the University of Barcelona, says that the contrasting /a/ and /o/ vowels are from the phonetic repertoire of both Spanish and Catalan.
She adds that sounds of low frequency, like such vowels, are also transmitted quite well through the womb, This is in comparison to high- and mid-frequency sounds that typically reach the fetus in a manner that is attenuated and degraded.
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Babies of Bilingual Moms Had Different Sound Processing, Wider Pitch Range Sensitivity
The study found that for babies who had monolingual mothers, they responded to the /o a/ sounds more due to their higher attuning to the pitch of the language of their mother.
As for babies who had multilingual mothers, they appeared to be sensitive towards all the sounds.
According to the researchers, this could mean that babies of monolingual months may have higher sensitivity to language pitch. As for babies of bilingual mothers, they could be more sensitive to a bigger pitch frequency range.
Carles Escera, a co-author of the study and professor of the University, says that the data reveals that prenatal language exposure could modulate speech sounds' neural encoding that is measured at birth. The results stress how important prenatal language exposure is when it comes to speech sound encoding at birth.
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