Werker – prenatal tuning

The tuning to the native language begins even before birth. So when babies are born, they show a preference for listening to their mother’s voice. This is old work by DeCasper and Fifer. They also show preference for listening to their native language, and what we’ve shown; this is work that I did with Krista Barrs-Highnline who’s now at Concordia; is that babies who were exposed to two languages in utero show a preference for both of their native languages in comparison to an unfamiliar language, but they none the less keep them apart. So the listening that occurred in utero which is probably to the rhythmical characteristics of the language, allows them to recognize something as familiar so they attend more. Yet at the same time what we think is really fascinating is that it didn’t sort of collapse language as language par language when we test them on their ability to discriminate two languages from different rhythmical classes even if they’re both familiar languages they heard in utero. They’re just as able to do so as a mono-lingual learning infant. So the tuning begins incredibly early, that’s evidence there’s tuning at birth.