Ottawa: A team of researchers from Canada's University of Montreal has found that "A few weeks of prenatal exposure to a new language is enough to rewire the language networks in a newborn's brain."

Put differently, a newborn's brain distinguishes between a language that it were exposed to in the womb over a period of a few weeks and another unfamiliar language.

Published in the scientific journal, Communications Biology, the study is the first of its kind to use brain imaging techniques to prove the scientific hypothesis put forward by psychiatry and neurology experts suspecting that fetuses and newborns could recognize familiar sounds and that they even prefered listening to their native languages immediately after birth.

Commenting on the study she supervised, Professor Anne Gallagher of the University of Montreal stated that while it cannot be said that infants learn language before birth, one could assert that newborns feel a sense of familiarity with languages they were exposed to in the womb, as this exposure creates neurotransmitters in their brains.

This study was conducted with the participation of 60 women at 35 weeks of pregnancy, 39 of whom were exposed to audio recordings of a story in French, their native language, for ten minutes, followed by listening to the same story in German for another ten minutes. This process was repeated daily throughout pregnancy.

Then, anywhere from 10 to 78 hours after birth, researchers played the same story to the newborn babies, this time in three languages: French, German, and a completely unfamiliar language.

The researchers found that, "When the babies heard French, their left temporal cortex was activated, as were other language regions, with a clear predominance in the left hemisphere. That is the same pattern observed in adults. A similar pattern was found when the babies heard the foreign language to which they had been exposed in the womb."

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