Jul 29, 2024 03:08 AM
(This post was last modified: Jul 29, 2024 09:43 PM by C C.)
https://aeon.co/essays/how-fetuses-learn...n-the-womb
EXCERPTS: Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus (from the Latin word vagire, meaning to wail).
[...] Vagitus uterinus occurs – always in the last trimester – when there’s a tear in the uterine membrane. The tear lets air into the uterine cavity, thus enabling the fetus to vocalise. Vagitus uterinus provided scientists with some of the earliest insights into the fetus’s vocal apparatus, showing that the body parts and neural systems involved in the act of crying are fully functional before birth.
[...] The first film of a living human fetus was made in January 1933, by Davenport Hooker, an anatomist at the University of Pittsburgh. ... Over a period of 25 years, Hooker filmed 149 fetuses, some of whom were spontaneously aborted, and others electively aborted for ‘the health, sanity, or life of the mother’, as Hooker wrote.
[...] Recent studies of prematurely born infants – conducted just a few years ago by Kimbrough Oller at the University of Memphis – have brought to light that fetuses born as young as 32 weeks (eight weeks before the usual date) do more than cry. They produce protophones, the infant sounds that eventually turn into speech. Meaning that a fetus in the last trimester of pregnancy can make all the sounds of a newborn infant.
Birth brings about tremendous changes in our physical and social environments, but life after birth is a continuation of life before birth.
Hooker’s findings had political consequences. When his science entered the public domain – in magazine spreads and a popular book called The First Nine Months of Life (1962), published just three years before his death – Hooker’s fetuses were used to illustrate the ‘wonder and beauty of human development’, without mention of abortion or where these fetuses came from.
This was the Space Age, and his fetuses were pictured as little astronauts travelling through space in a placental capsule. The portrayals helped propagate a myth of independent fetal life – a way of thinking that had not existed publicly when Hooker began his research. In the 1970s, anti-abortion activists began using his work to plead their cases, including in briefs to the US Supreme Court.
Most visual representations of pregnancy are misleading, says the developmental biologist Scott Gilbert, professor emeritus at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. The mother and fetus are not separated by a cavity. Although often depicted this way, the fetus is not a tenant inside a vessel. Instead, the mother and fetus share arteries, veins and membranes. The placenta is an organ composed of both maternal and fetal tissues.
‘There is no clear boundary marking the place where the fetus ends and the uterus begins,’ Gilbert explains. The mother and fetus share a united anatomy, as well as cardiovascular, pulmonary, immune and metabolic systems. Pregnancy changes the mother’s physiology in ways that help both her and the fetus survive. Environmental factors that jolt the mother’s physiology – such as exposure to poverty, war, pollution or extreme heat events – will change the fetus.
In strict scientific terms, neither the fetus nor the mother is a traditional biological ‘individual’. They are a fused entity. Political manoeuvrings to grant fetuses personhood, separate from their mothers, are not grounded in science...
[...] Vowel sounds penetrate the fetus’s inner ear better than high-frequency consonants because the uterine environment acts as a low-pass filter, absorbing and muffling sound frequencies above 600 Hz. While individual speech sounds are suppressed in the womb, what remains prominent are the variations in pitch, intensity and duration – what linguists refer to as the prosody of speech.
[...] Prosody is what gives speech its musical quality. When we listen to someone speak, prosody helps us interpret their emotions, intentions and the overall meaning of their message. Different languages have different prosodic patterns...
[...] Language learning begins in the womb, and it begins with prosody. Exposure to speech in the womb leads to lasting changes in the brain, increasing the newborns’ sensitivity to previously heard languages. The mother’s voice is the most dominant and consistent sound in the womb, so the person carrying the fetus gets first dibs on influencing the fetus. If the mother speaks two languages, her infant will show equal preference and discrimination for both languages.
The fetus’s knowledge of native prosody goes beyond perception. Kathleen Wermke, Anne Christophe and their colleagues in Würzburg and Paris collected and analysed the cries of 30 German and 30 French newborns from strictly monolingual families. They found that the French newborns tended to cry with a rising – low to high – pitch, whereas the German newborns cried more with a falling – high to low – pitch. Their patterns were consistent with the accents of adults speaking French and German.
The newborns had not just memorised the prosody of their native languages; they were actively moving air through their vocal cords and controlling the movements of their mouth to mimic this prosody in their own vocalisations. Babies are communicating as soon as they are born, and these abilities are developing in the nine months before birth... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus (from the Latin word vagire, meaning to wail).
[...] Vagitus uterinus occurs – always in the last trimester – when there’s a tear in the uterine membrane. The tear lets air into the uterine cavity, thus enabling the fetus to vocalise. Vagitus uterinus provided scientists with some of the earliest insights into the fetus’s vocal apparatus, showing that the body parts and neural systems involved in the act of crying are fully functional before birth.
[...] The first film of a living human fetus was made in January 1933, by Davenport Hooker, an anatomist at the University of Pittsburgh. ... Over a period of 25 years, Hooker filmed 149 fetuses, some of whom were spontaneously aborted, and others electively aborted for ‘the health, sanity, or life of the mother’, as Hooker wrote.
[...] Recent studies of prematurely born infants – conducted just a few years ago by Kimbrough Oller at the University of Memphis – have brought to light that fetuses born as young as 32 weeks (eight weeks before the usual date) do more than cry. They produce protophones, the infant sounds that eventually turn into speech. Meaning that a fetus in the last trimester of pregnancy can make all the sounds of a newborn infant.
Birth brings about tremendous changes in our physical and social environments, but life after birth is a continuation of life before birth.
Hooker’s findings had political consequences. When his science entered the public domain – in magazine spreads and a popular book called The First Nine Months of Life (1962), published just three years before his death – Hooker’s fetuses were used to illustrate the ‘wonder and beauty of human development’, without mention of abortion or where these fetuses came from.
This was the Space Age, and his fetuses were pictured as little astronauts travelling through space in a placental capsule. The portrayals helped propagate a myth of independent fetal life – a way of thinking that had not existed publicly when Hooker began his research. In the 1970s, anti-abortion activists began using his work to plead their cases, including in briefs to the US Supreme Court.
Most visual representations of pregnancy are misleading, says the developmental biologist Scott Gilbert, professor emeritus at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. The mother and fetus are not separated by a cavity. Although often depicted this way, the fetus is not a tenant inside a vessel. Instead, the mother and fetus share arteries, veins and membranes. The placenta is an organ composed of both maternal and fetal tissues.
‘There is no clear boundary marking the place where the fetus ends and the uterus begins,’ Gilbert explains. The mother and fetus share a united anatomy, as well as cardiovascular, pulmonary, immune and metabolic systems. Pregnancy changes the mother’s physiology in ways that help both her and the fetus survive. Environmental factors that jolt the mother’s physiology – such as exposure to poverty, war, pollution or extreme heat events – will change the fetus.
In strict scientific terms, neither the fetus nor the mother is a traditional biological ‘individual’. They are a fused entity. Political manoeuvrings to grant fetuses personhood, separate from their mothers, are not grounded in science...
[...] Vowel sounds penetrate the fetus’s inner ear better than high-frequency consonants because the uterine environment acts as a low-pass filter, absorbing and muffling sound frequencies above 600 Hz. While individual speech sounds are suppressed in the womb, what remains prominent are the variations in pitch, intensity and duration – what linguists refer to as the prosody of speech.
[...] Prosody is what gives speech its musical quality. When we listen to someone speak, prosody helps us interpret their emotions, intentions and the overall meaning of their message. Different languages have different prosodic patterns...
[...] Language learning begins in the womb, and it begins with prosody. Exposure to speech in the womb leads to lasting changes in the brain, increasing the newborns’ sensitivity to previously heard languages. The mother’s voice is the most dominant and consistent sound in the womb, so the person carrying the fetus gets first dibs on influencing the fetus. If the mother speaks two languages, her infant will show equal preference and discrimination for both languages.
The fetus’s knowledge of native prosody goes beyond perception. Kathleen Wermke, Anne Christophe and their colleagues in Würzburg and Paris collected and analysed the cries of 30 German and 30 French newborns from strictly monolingual families. They found that the French newborns tended to cry with a rising – low to high – pitch, whereas the German newborns cried more with a falling – high to low – pitch. Their patterns were consistent with the accents of adults speaking French and German.
The newborns had not just memorised the prosody of their native languages; they were actively moving air through their vocal cords and controlling the movements of their mouth to mimic this prosody in their own vocalisations. Babies are communicating as soon as they are born, and these abilities are developing in the nine months before birth... (MORE - missing details)
![[Image: aW5i8w8.jpeg]](https://i.imgur.com/aW5i8w8.jpeg)