News Finding: Babies may recognize words that they hear in the womb.
Paper Finding: In infancy, auditory learning implicates the formation and strengthening of neural long-term memory traces, improving discrimination skills, in particular those forming the prerequisites for speech perception and understanding.
News Context: Babies may recognize words that they hear in the womb. The team said their research showed that babies in the womb hear the words being said around them -- and they remember them too. The claim may seem incredible.
Paper Context: In infancy, auditory learning implicates the formation and strengthening of neural long-term memory traces, improving discrimination skills, in particular those forming the prerequisites for speech perception and understanding. Here we demonstrate direct neural correlates of human fetal learning of speech-like auditory stimuli. We presented variants of words to fetuses; unlike infants with no exposure to these stimuli, the exposed fetuses showed enhanced brain activity (mismatch responses) in response to pitch changes for the trained variants after birth.