Learning a foreign language–before you're born | Hacker News Reader

Learning a foreign language–before you're born

nouvelles.umontreal.ca

79 pointsXzetaU839 comments

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?

The article explicitly mentions (towards the end) that this is far from evidence for language learning. But such a headline makes for clicks I guess.

It's probably a learning process for sounds that are typical in a language. Later in life we can also distinguish different languages even though we don't speak them. Many non-English-speakers will still identify a song like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol as being English, even though it only uses sounds that are typical for English.

I started learning Arabic at about 45, and many sounds I've learned to make with my mouth, but I can not distinguish with my ears when other people speak. For instance ك/ق or س/ص or د/ض.

It's as if my brain is binning these sounds together and I can not retrain the binning.

Can you hear the difference when you ask someone to really exaggerate their articulation and enunciation? Because with most languages I speak I tend to have difficulty understanding people when they don't talk like a radio weather forecaster.

Other than asking people to talk slower, I haven't tried asking people to change their speech. Maybe I should.

Well, two of them you mentioned, ض/ص you can imagine the tongue making a bowl shape when you say them.

Saying/hearing is not the same. Parent struggles to hear the differences and says they can pronounce them.

Polish has a retroflex and palatalized “sh” pair of sounds (Sz vs ś) that I can pronounce perfectly but not clearly distinguish as a listener.

I learned Polish when I was 5, moved back to the states when I was 11, barely used it for 7 years, and relearned it when I was 18. I don’t know if (at 5) I ever distinguished between the two. But I certainly struggle now.

Same for me with Dzongkha: cha (ཅ) / chha (ཆ) and tsa (ཙ) / thsa (ཚ). I can aspirate the second of these fine, so that's not the problem. Hearing the difference is. This also makes it harder to remember the spelling as I mix them up all the time.

To be fair, I've only been learning for a short while (8 months or so) and haven't had much opportunity to listen to a lot of different speakers so perhaps this may get better.

If it’s anything like the aspirated consonants in Hindi, usually the aspirated one of the pair ends up being sounded out slightly longer because of the expelling of breath. That’s how I learned to recognize it. Aspirating was actually much harder for me at first than hearing it.

Thank you. Yes, I am able to articulate the sounds more or less.

That said, any other tips on pronunciation are greatly appreciated! I did not realise that the tongue makes the same shape with both letters - I was not making a proper bowl with ض.

I shared this article with my sister. Unfortunately I have lost faith in most people to read the full article. Within 30 seconds of sending the article she responds with "Sadly I don't know two languages! So we will focus on english together"

To me the point is to toss as much at the brain as possible. Not limit yourself or your child with monoculture.

A little empathy can go a long way. Perhaps your sister simply has different taste in reading than you do? For example, I opened the article and closed it pretty much right away because it has all the hallmarks of a clickbait nothing burger.

A lot of people worry that exposing their baby to another language will somehow impair its ability to learn theirs. This isn't true, but people worry anyway.

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The result described in this press release isn't new. We already knew that neonates are able to distinguish languages they've been exposed to from languages that they haven't been. What this study adds is "we documented an existing known result, but with some pictures of brain activity".

Brain activity is always good for an extra publication. Compare the classic paper Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf .

I think about this quite often, as 2 of my kids were born in Ireland, but grew up elsewhere (Slavic country). I speak English with them, but so do some of my friends/neighbors with their kids. The other kids would seldom speak English though, while my kids seem to default to English somehow. Btw. they left Ireland when they were 2y and 9months old (now 9 and 7), never attended daycare there, were only exposed to English at grocery stores, doctors etc. My point is, the early exposure to the language seem to make huge difference. I'm sure it's a combination of other things too but I'd say it is definitely a strong factor. [edits: grammar]

> while my kids seem to default to English somehow.

> I speak English with them

You seem to know the answer already :) Kids regularly find "more reliable" adults and weight their opinion, manners and ideas higher than others, so if you're mainly speaking English to them, they'll default to trying to adopt to that, even if the main language is different all around them.

figuring out how to turn on brain plasticity and motivation networks, and just kill anxiety, would make life quite interesting. it's too bad that improvements in neuroscience are the absolute most insane Pandora's box, with dictatorships potentially rewiring their people's brain for compliance and whatnot, thought reading, thought implantation, all nightmarish

You wouldn’t want to fully kill anxiety though, in healthy doses it serves a purpose

The first time I ever saw a psychologist this was one of the things they told me.

Specifically, that athletes tend to do better when anxious.

I think about this very often when I find myself very comfortable and under no stress, I can feel my performance dropping.

> dictatorships potentially rewiring their people's brain for compliance and whatnot

They do this to everyone already.

You say that like its a bad thing.

when is it a good thing?

There is a lot of people that left to their own devices would definitely be a net loss on society. By shepherding them to utility and societally beneficial behaviors they will not be a negative.

you're the problem

You best believe I'm definitely part of it.

Maybe this is why I'm such an enjoyer of Russian bands like Aquarium and GrOb? My parents listening to them while I was in the cooker in 1996?

Nevertheless, I'm basically illiterate when it comes to writing Russian.

i have a problem with these kinds of titles. you always see these titles that appear to contradict themselves or baffle people in order to bait people into clicking. the title should be “exposure to language in the womb appears to have lasting impact” or something like that. when i see baffle bait on HN it just makes me feel embarrassed. i think there should be a guideline against it honestly.

Yeah, this is a press F to doubt kind of situation, for many reasons: frontal cortex not developed, Broca’s and Werneke’s areas not developed, sounds not transmitting through a belly and through amniotic fluid into an undeveloped auditory canal, etc.

Easy to spot bullshit that sounds more like an April Fools post than anything else.

all languages are foreign before you’re born

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