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Title is adult centric. All languages are foreign. It could have said: babies learn to recognize sounds before they are born.


Title is correct. "Foreign", in terms of language, is a language not spoken typically in one's home country. Now, a home country only applies to a person after they've been born, which is not the case of the subjects of the article. But still, we can give a bit of leeway to the author, and just presume the home country of the unborn child, and so, interpret the concept of a "foreign language" correctly.


Assuming home countries only have one language… maybe you could refer to the mother tongue’s language.


No, the definition doesn't constrain the country to one language.


Have you ever noticed that every other adult is seemingly unable to comprehend what being a kid is like?


Languages are not the same as generic sounds to the human brain. Title is clickbaity but I also think it more or less communicates the point of the article


Languages are not the same as generic sounds but they are all made of "generic sounds" (let's call them speech contrasts).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01636...


The point of the study was to see if just a small amount of language exposure would be enough for the unborn baby to start learning it. And the answer was yes.

For a native language, the unborn baby gets a lot of exposure. Only with a foreign language would an unborn baby get a small amount of exposure.


Yes. But I’d temper the word "learning", because even the study itself doesn’t imply that. It refers to "brain responses."

"Prenatal linguistic exposure shapes language brain responses at birth"

<https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08594-8>

By the way, it's a great research paper (as far as I can understand it), and in my opinion, the Université de Montréal summary doesn't do it justice.


> All languages are foreign.

The babies are exposed to French the whole pregnancy and after, it's the foreign Hebrew/German they are testing for.

This is a meaningless comment.

The study is most likely bunk, but this nit pick is boring and wrong, they should have enough native French exposure already, it's the foreign language that matters.


Epigenetics?




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