Your unborn child is listening.
A new study out of the University of Helsinki concludes that a fetus can not only hear sounds from the outside world while in the womb, the baby can actually identify specific words shortly after being born.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) sensors on 33 newborns to reach their conclusion.
When the 33 babies were still in the womb — specifically, while their expectant mothers were in their third trimester — the mothers-to-be were divided into two groups. One group was required to listen to repeating sequences of "tatata," a nonsensical word, with different syllable and tone variations and interspersed with music. Some of the participants listened to the meaningless word a mind-numbingly total of 25,000 times.
"It is a so-called 'pseudoword' that is important for research. It has three syllables, and we chose such a long word to make it challenging for the small brains to find the changes and give them something difficult to learn," says study co-author Minna Huotilainen, a docent at the University of Helsinki's Finnish Center of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research. "Such a word could exist in Finnish. It follows all the rules of the Finnish language."
The other group did not listen to a recording.
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Five days after each child's birth, the researchers played the "tatata" recording to the newborn while monitoring the infant's brain waves.
Babies who'd heard the word while in utero showed a specific "neural signal for recognizing vowel and pitch changes" that the babies who had no previous exposure to the word did not, Science reports.
When the babies most familiar with the word were introduced to one of its variations, they showed a "mismatch response," suggesting that the babies recognized the differences in its pronunciation.
"Once we learn a sound, if it's repeated to us often enough, we form a memory of it, which is activated when we hear the sound again," Eino Partanen, a cognitive neuroscientist and the study's lead author, tells Science. "This leads us to believe that the fetus can learn much more detailed information than we previously thought."
A 1988 study found that newborns appeared to recognize theme songs to TV shows their mothers watched while pregnant. Other studies concluded that babies start familiarizing themselves with the patterns of their native language before they even enter the world.
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"If you put your hand over your mouth and speak, that's very similar to the situation the fetus is in," says Partanen. "You can hear the rhythm of speech, rhythm of music, and so on."
"Be aware that the fetus can hear something from the outside world and learn from it," study co-author Huotilainen tells HealthDay. "Speak during your pregnancy. You can speak to other people or to your fetus if you like."
Researchers cannot yet link a child's enhanced linguistic capabilities with parents-to-be chatting at a pregnant belly nonstop. This study does raise interesting questions about early development, however: If a newborn has memories from the womb, how long do they last?
"I think it is a very good paper with important results," says developmental psychologist Christine Moon, of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, adding that it could pave the way for future studies to further break down the in-utero learning process.
"The better we know how the fetus’ brain works, the more we’ll know [about] early development of language," Partanen tells NBC News. "If we know better how language develops very early, we may one day be able to develop very early interventions [for babies with abnormal development]."
Did your newborn appear to recognize sounds he/she would have heard from the womb?