How children pick up a language: fetal speech (Humans)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 25, 2024, 19:16 (119 days ago) @ David Turell

Picking up Mother's language in womb:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-fetuses-learn-to-talk-while-theyre-still-in-the-womb?utm_sou...

"Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus...The obstetrician Malcolm McLane described an incident that occurred in a hospital in the United States in 1897. He was prepping a patient for a c-section, when her unborn baby began to wail, and kept going for several minutes....In 1973, doctors in Belgium recorded the vitals of three wailing fetuses and concluded that vagitus uterinus is not a sign of distress.

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"Vagitus uterinus occurs – always in the last trimester – when there’s a tear in the uterine membrane. The tear lets air into the uterine cavity, thus enabling the fetus to vocalise. Vagitus uterinus provided scientists with some of the earliest insights into the fetus’s vocal apparatus, showing that the body parts and neural systems involved in the act of crying are fully functional before birth.

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"...babies aren’t just crying for attention. While crying, they are practising the melodies of speech. In fact, newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue. They make vowel-like sounds, growl and squeal – these are protophones, sounds that eventually turn into speech.

"Babies communicate as soon as they are born. Rigorous analyses of the developmental origins of these behaviours reveal that, contrary to popular belief – even among scientists – they are not hardwired into our brain structures or preordained by our genes. Instead, the latest research – including my own – shows that these behaviours self-organise in utero through the continuous dance between brain, body and environment.

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Recent studies of prematurely born infants...have brought to light that fetuses born as young as 32 weeks (eight weeks before the usual date) do more than cry. They produce protophones, the infant sounds that eventually turn into speech. Meaning that a fetus in the last trimester of pregnancy can make all the sounds of a newborn infant.

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My work with Ghazanfar and Takahashi established – for the first time in a primate – that the ability to vocalise at birth is not ‘innate’. Rather, it undergoes a lengthy period of prenatal development, even before sound can be produced.

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While individual speech sounds are suppressed in the womb, what remains prominent are the variations in pitch, intensity and duration – what linguists refer to as the prosody of speech.

Prosody is what gives speech its musical quality. When we listen to someone speak, prosody helps us interpret their emotions, intentions and the overall meaning of their message. Different languages have different prosodic patterns... They found that the infants had learned the prosodic patterns – duration contrast versus pitch contrast – of their mother tongue.

Language learning begins in the womb, and it begins with prosody. Exposure to speech in the womb leads to lasting changes in the brain, increasing the newborns’ sensitivity to previously heard languages. The mother’s voice is the most dominant and consistent sound in the womb, so the person carrying the fetus gets first dibs on influencing the fetus. If the mother speaks two languages, her infant will show equal preference and discrimination for both languages.

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The newborns had not just memorised the prosody of their native languages; they were actively moving air through their vocal cords and controlling the movements of their mouth to mimic this prosody in their own vocalisations. Babies are communicating as soon as they are born, and these abilities are developing in the nine months before birth.

There is no genetic blueprint, programme or watchmaker who knows how it must turn out in the end. The reality of how these behaviours come to be is far more sophisticated and elegant. They develop through continuous interactions across multiple levels of causation – from genes to culture.

"...which of these factors are the primary drivers of vocal development – our genes or brain? – and which ones are merely supporting – the body? How much of their communication do babies owe to nature versus nurture? Is it more nature or nurture? I guarantee you, there are no scientifically defensible answers to these questions.

Comment: our ability to speak with real words is obviously a built-in process affected by all of the influences the author lists. Every one is of equal importance. Picking up syntax seems a built-in attribute of the brain. We were evolved to have language.