Infants remember speech heard in the womb

CDC

Human fetuses begin to hear sounds that reach them from outside the womb at about 27 weeks. But it wasn’t clear whether fetuses can learn from these sounds in ways that shape speech perception and development during infancy.

Now it appears they can. New research from the University of Helsinki suggests that humans begin to distinguish between sounds before they are even born. Eino Partanen and colleagues explored how pre-natal experiences influence learning. “We wanted to find out what kind of material fetuses can learn in the womb, what kind of neural representations they form,” he said.

People started to become interested in fetal learning in the 1980s. It was only then that researchers picked up on the widespread anecdotal evidence on the topic. There are frequent stories of infants apparently recognizing and responding to music that was played to them before birth.