Singing helps children remember the songs from the mother's belly

Prenatal Learning: Infants remember music in the womb
If expectant mothers sing to their offspring before birth or play music, this can have positive effects on the development of the child. For babies remember according to the latest study findings in the womb heard. This has an impact on speech understanding.

Audition calms babies
Many mothers like to sing to their baby to calm it down. That this works, could already be scientifically proven. Researchers from the University of Montreal, Canada, found that singing calms crying babies much better than speech. Women should start auditioning before birth. As Austrian scientists have now found in a study, babies remember things heard in the womb. And that has an impact on speech understanding.

Pregnant women should sing to their baby before birth or play music. For babies, according to studies, remember what they heard in the womb. (Image: WavebreakMediaMicro / fotolia.com)

Unborn babies in the womb
"About the seventh month of pregnancy, babies begin to hear in the womb. As newborns, they recognize in the first few weeks the voice of the mother and noises that they have often heard in the womb - even pieces of music, "writes the Techniker Krankenkasse (TK) on its website.

This was also shown by a recent study in Austria. According to this, babies remember children's songs that their mother sang during pregnancy.

Intense reactions to maternal singing
As reported by the news agency APA, the study of 30 newborns at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Salzburg showed that infants react intensively to maternal singing. The researchers assume that this facilitates or improves understanding of speech.

According to the researchers, 30 pregnant women had two children's songs ("Bi-Ba-Butzemann" and "Sleep, my little one") sing and recorded them on CD. The expectant mothers then played these songs twice a day from the 34th week of pregnancy on the in-house music system at a certain volume.

In the second and fifth week after the birth, the children were rehearsed for the songs - sung by the mother and another woman - and their brain response measured by a special EEG.

Improvement of speech understanding
The experts found that it comes to a phasing of the brain waves in the vibrations of the language.

Manuel Schabus, head of the Laboratory for Sleep, Cognitive and Consciousness Research at the University of Salzburg, told APA: "The valleys and mountains of the two oscillations overlap, the brain apparently tries to resonate in a similar way to the language subdivide the syllables. "

Presumably, this coupling of the brain to speech facilitates or enhances speech understanding. Of course, according to Schabus, infants could not understand the semantics of the lyrics, "but they may well break the words as we break syllables".

It is said that this coupling was even more intense when the songs were sung by the mother and not by another woman.

Studies on prenatal learning
According to Schabus, previous prenatal studies have been done with very few babies. In addition, the reaction of the children is registered only by heart rate, Nuckelfrequenz or movement patterns. Brain studies at this early age did not exist.

The scientists want to examine the - not yet published - results for confirmation, a control group of infants who have not heard the songs in the womb. (Ad)