Babies’ brains recognize foreign languages they heard before birth

The link is to a Scientific American article. The original paper can be found here with the following abstract:

Newborns have an immature brain network responsible for speech processing that resembles the adult language network. However, it remains unclear how prenatal experience modulates this network. To test this, we exposed 39 fetuses to a story in their native language and in a foreign language during the last month of gestation, while another group of 21 fetuses received no experimental prenatal exposure. Within 3 days of life, neonates’ brain responses were recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) whilst they listened to the same story in their native language and in two foreign languages, one of which neonates had been prenatally exposed to. Results revealed that brain responses to the native language and the prenatally exposed foreign language were similar, whereas they differed in the left temporal and right prefrontal regions when listening to a prenatally unexposed foreign language. Findings indicate that foetuses’ linguistic environment influences speech processing at birth.

I don't think anyone in the field will be particularly shocked by the results of this study but it is still an interesting data point.

Also: I like the word neonate.

A meta question: should articles like this be under ~humanities.languages or ~science? I never know.

It feels wrong to post them under ~humanities, as it feels like promoting the view that linguistics isn't a "real science" but some kind of a softer more philosophical humanist enterprise. Not that there is anything wrong with philosophical humanist study, far from if. But it feels different than what the formal, applied or social science of actual linguistic research is.

But then, it also feels wrong to post these in ~science since we already have a separate language related group. Of course, it is "languages" and not "language", so perhaps this is meant to cover only common language use and language arts, not the study of the nature of language?

Surely, I'm overthinking this. Or am I?