Science agrees that lullabies are very beneficial for infants. This is why parents sing it to their children before they are even born. Austrian researchers have discovered that babies as young as a few weeks old are able to recognize nursery rhymes they heard when they were in their mother’s womb.
A research team affiliated with the University of Salzburg arrived at this discovery after conducting an experiment with sixty pregnant women. The latter made their baby listen to two German nursery rhymes through speakers placed on their abdomen, twice a day from the 34th week of pregnancy.
Two weeks after giving birth, the newborns listened to one of the lullabies they had discovered in utero, and another that they had never heard before. During this phase of the experiment, the infants’ brain activity was recorded so that the scientists could determine whether they were familiar with the nursery rhymes they were listening to and how much they were paying attention to them.
It appeared that toddlers found it easier to follow lullabies that they first listened to while in their mothers’ womb. The researchers found that unfamiliar nursery rhymes elicited a stronger brain electrical response in infants, suggesting that infants exerted more cognitive effort to listen to them.
During the experiment, the researchers also altered the rhythm of the nursery rhymes that they played to the babies. For example, they played them backwards and modified them so that they no longer contained high-frequency sounds. It turns out that infants had to exert more effort to follow the altered lullabies than the original ones, suggesting that they are able to differentiate between the recordings.
The authors of this study, published on the pre-publication site bioRxiv, concluded that babies can recognize the lullabies that their parents sang to them before they were born. They seem sensitive to musicality and prosody when they are still in their mother’s womb, as if their brains were immediately equipped with the necessary devices to differentiate one sound from another. A study from the Marquès Institute dating from 2018 even states that babies in utero have a preference for classical music, like Mozart’s “A Little Night Music”.
