Bilingualism Begins in Utero

Filed in archive Other Pregnancy Issues on February 18, 2010

© (nutmeg)

If you speak a second language and you would like for your child to eventually learn that language, then let her hear you speak it now while you are pregnant. In a study comparing babies born to English monoligual mothers and babies born to Tagalog-English bilingual mothers, results suggest that prenatal bilingual exposure may affect infants' language preferences, preparing bilingual infants to listen to and learn about both of their native languages. In addition, it appeared that babies are able to discriminate languages even at an early age, which might explain how children brought up in bilingual (or multilingual) environments do not get confused with the languages.

My children are effectively bilingual (English and German) and all this time, I thought it was a result of our consistent efforts at enforcing the one parent-one language approach in our household. But it appears that our children were primed to becoming bilingual even before they were born, having been exposed to both languages in utero!

Now I wonder, if English was the only language one knows and speaks, could one increase her baby's linguistic potentials, for example by playing foreign language audiobooks, music, etc?