The Norwegian Fetus (Part I of II)

We’ve all heard horror stories about women who’ve experienced some trauma during pregnancy, only to have their baby born with an impression of that trauma stamped into their physical or psychological being. Take, for instance, the woman who, frightened by a stampeding elephant, dies while giving birth to a child with an enormous head. Or the woman who, after an encounter with a nervous horse, delivers a hoofed babe. An old wive’s tale? Maybe so, but ought we really throw the baby out with the bathwater?

A growing literature on prenatal learning seems to suggest that experiences in the womb offer profound contributions to child development. Children are born not only with a preference for the familiar voices of their parents, but also with a favorable disposition toward their parents’ native language. Newborns will spend more time looking at a person speaking their mother’s native language than they will someone speaking another language. By the time it is born, an infant will already have acquired some experiential knowledge of familiar rhythms, movements, and even the metabolic habits of its mother. But, can you teach a fetus culture?

A child’s sense of hearing is already developed at 16 weeks of gestation, allowing it to attune itself in particular to the acoustic signals of the mother’s voice, which is both most accessible over time and least susceptible to distortion in space. By the 27th week, the child is already able to mimic some of its mother’s speech patterns, acoustic spectroscopic analyses of its cry reveal. Even though the fetus is not acquiring a vocabulary per se, it is acquiring the linguistic foundation it will need for later language development. The rate, frequency, and inflectional richness of the mother’s speech is already setting the stage for baby’s future communication patterns.

If you’re interested in passing on your cultural heritage from day one, begin by stimulating your child’s acoustic world. If you’re a Norwegian speaker, try to use the language frequently in conversation, sing Norwegian songs, or even read Norwegian stories aloud to your unborn child. If you’re not a Norwegian speaker already, then take a class during pregnancy: this will be much more effective than playing language tapes to your stomach. Since your baby is already developing a preference for your voice and vocal inflections, your contribution can do much more in reinforcing the development of language recognition.

Babies in the womb can also retain frequently repeated rhythms and rhymes, learning ones they had been exposed to prenatally much faster than those they had no exposure to. Find a simple children’s rhyme or song in Norwegian and make an effort to repeat it at least once a day during your third trimester. This will not only stimulate pattern recognition, but may also come in handy later when trying to soothe the wailing newborn. Even listening to Norwegian music and gently moving to the rhythm may create lasting impressions of your cultural heritage.

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