Typical movie scene: the woman giving birth, writhing in pain, utters insults to her partner wildly. But be careful, because the first words that the baby remembers are those reproach ... A study indicates that Newborns can remember the words They have heard even if they have few days to live.
It shows for the first time a certain linguistic ability of babies: that the right frontal region of the brain could be responsible for vocal recognition already during the early stages of language acquisition.
The study, conducted by experts from the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) at the Santa Maria de la Misericordia hospital in Udine (Italy) with 44 babies, has been published in the journal of the Academy of Sciences of the United States.
And although it was already known that from the moment of birth there are specific areas of the human brain that are activated when they hear words, it was unknown if the brain of newborns manages to code and remember the sound of words.
To investigate this aspect, the experts carried out tests saying simple words to the babies, and repeating them after two minutes. The test envisaged repeating the same words or changing the vowels and leaving the same comforters, or vice versa, changing the consonants and leaving the vowels.
To establish the ability to memorize the sound of a word and distinguish it, during the tests the children were examined with a non-invasive technique called "near-infrared spectroscopy."
Through this technique it is possible to know which cortical networks are activated during the test: in the case of babies, that area is the right frontal region, the same that is activated in adults during the memory of the words.
For researchers, "turning on" that area in newborns during vocal recognition shows that children recognize only the words that have the same vowels of others heard in the preceding way.
We know the importance of the baby's first hours in many ways. Will linguistic stimuli be so important? Anyway, they are not supposed to know the meaning of those words until much later but, just in case, future dads or recent dads, watch out for the first words the baby hears…
