Expose your babies in the womb to classical music and other forms of auditory stimulation, we sometimes hear people say to pregnant women. Yet a new study by researchers from University of Florida (UF) claims a mom’s voice is all that babies really need to hear.
The researchers enlisted 32 pregnant women aged 18 to 39 years old and who are in their 28th week of conception with their first child. Sixty-eight percent of the pregnant women were of white race, 28 percent were of black ethnicity and four percent were from another ethnicity or race.
The pregnant women were asked to recite a nursery rhyme three times daily for six weeks to their babies, starting on their 28th week or third trimester of pregnancy.
The testing also involved a fetal heart rate monitor to record the heart rate of the babies and find out if there are any changes along the way.
The same set rhyme recited by the mothers were also spoken and recorded by a female stranger, and then played to babies who were part of the experimental group. The control group, meanwhile, listened to the female stranger’s recording of a different rhyme. The two activities were meant to identify if the fetus simply responded to the voice of its mother or to a familiar speech pattern.
Results of the study show that babies in wombs already start to react to the rhythm of the nursery rhyme on the 34th week of conception and imply the capability to remember the set rhyme until a little before birth, thus indicating proof of learning.
“The mother’s voice is the predominant source of sensory stimulation in the developing fetus,” says Charlene Krueger, a nursing researcher and associate professor at UF’s College of Nursing, in a statement.
Krueger adds that the research highlights the sophistication of the fetus in its third trimester and signifies that the voice of a mother helps in developing “early learning and memory capabilities,” which could affect how people would care for and stimulate a preterm infant.
“This study helped us understand more about how early a fetus could learn a passage of speech and whether the passage could be remembered weeks later even without daily exposure to it,” says Krueger.
Krueger, however, admits there’s a need for further research to completely understand the effects of ongoing development to memory and learning of babies.
The Infant Behavior and Development journal published the said study of Krueger and her research team.
