Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

University of Delaware

Courtney Gray

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

Abstract

In the past, language acquisition has been viewed as a process that occurs from birth onward;

however, this view has made it hard to explain why newborns appear to have astonishing

auditory discrimination and language building abilities. Nativist, most notably Noam Chomsky,

suggest that there is an innate language faculty that equips an infant with the ability to build the

complex grammar of a language. While it is evident that an infant does possess certain abilities

at birth that make language acquisition possible, the study of language acquisition has been

restricted by the concept of innateness as it fails to address how these abilities arise in the

developing mind. Recent discoveries in prenatal learning reveal that embryos do have the ability

to perceive and learn from auditory stimuli as early as 24 weeks into gestation, and that

experiences inside the womb can in turn effect development following birth (Gervain, 2015).

This paper, utilizes evidence of prenatal learning and its implications on further development to

propose a continuum of language acquisition that starts in the womb and extend through out

one’s development. Prenatal learning gives rise to auditory discrimination abilities, through

which an infant is able to divide a speech stream into sound units based off of phonological

features. These sound units act as the mental representations that referential meaning can be

attached to through social learning, thus resulting in vocabulary acquisition. Repetition of word

sounds with one’s own motor mechanisms can further enhance this process of novel vocabulary

acquisition through the aid of a phonological loop.

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

Over the last few decades, the fields of cognitive science and linguistics have been busy

at work trying to discover what it is about humans and their cognitive functions that make

language possible. Much of this research has taken place with the frame of the Nativist vs.

Empirist debate, which has sides arguing whether there is an innate language faculty or if

language acquisition is purely a result of experience and learning. However, in recent decades it

has become clear that language acquisition, like many other developmental processes in humans,

is a result of some kind of interaction between an individual’s innate biology (nature) and

experiences (nurture). Recent developments in prenatal learning have further complicated this

debate as it has become clear that embryos are perceiving sounds even with in the womb. In this

paper I will briefly outline the developments of the Nativist debate and how discoveries in

prenatal learning provide support for language acquisition from general learning faculties rather

than a specified innate language acquisition device. I will then borrow ideas from Michelle

Merrit (2008) to offer a view of language acquisition as a continuum, in which the complexity of

language emerges throughout development as a process of specifying speech sound and

expanding upon their representational meanings through social interaction and motor rehearsal.

The Nativist and Empirist Debate

Much of the Nativist versus Empirist debate can be attributed to Noam Chomsky’s

(1959) review of B.F Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. During this time, the psychological field was

dominated by the ideologies of Skinner and behaviorism, which centered on Skinner’s concept of

operant conditioning. According to operant conditioning, learning results from the reinforcement

or weakening of behaviors through reward and punishment; thus, learning is facilitated by the

consequences of one’s behavior and is rooted in experience (Skinner, 1957). In his review,

Chomsky challenges Skinner and behaviorism by stating that behavioral learning cannot

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

adequately explain how quickly infants are able to acquire the complex grammar of a language.

Chomsky proposes that humans have an innate ability to acquire language that is facilitated by a

specified language faculty in the brain, which contains the common grammatical features across

all languages; this is known as Universal Grammar (UG) (Chomsky, 1959). According to

Chomsky children use this innate grammatical material (UG) to quickly acquire a grammar for

any language they are sufficiently exposed to.

This presumption of a specific language faculty in the mind sparked a debate within the

field of linguistics concerning the ideas of innateness and language acquisition. Traditionally,

innateness of language refers to what properties of language learning are present at birth. Yet,

logically any evidence of learning occurring before birth challenges this concept all together.

Therefore, I propose a different way to approach the idea of innateness that is able to encapsulate

prenatal learning (learning that occurs in the womb before childbirth). In the context of this

argumentative paper, I will be defining innateness in language acquisition as the functional and

cognitive abilities predisposed in the brain that facilitate language acquisition.

In recent times, the focus of the innateness of language debate is not concerned with

whether language is a natural ability for humans, as its universality suggests it is. Rather much of

the discussion has questioned whether the predisposition to acquire a language is facilitated by a

specific language faculty, as Chomsky proposed, or if general cognitive learning abilities lend

themselves to language acquisition. Thus the debate is focused on if language acquisition results

from language specific or general learning mechanisms. In this paper, I will utilize current

evidence of prenatal learning to propose that language arises as a result of the interaction and

specialization of general cognitive domains not wholly specific to language.

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

Prenatal Learning

It is clear that when a baby is born they already have a plethora of cognitive abilities and

a fully functional, yet still malleable, nervous system controlled by the brain. In the past, the

development of these innate cognitive abilities was rarely questions, but technological

advancements now allow researchers to study neural development within the womb. Recent

studies have made it undeniable that experiences inside the womb have an influence on cognitive

development. In particular, it has been proven that embryos of multiple species are able to

receive and perceive sound waves in utero (Colombelli-Negrel, Hauber, & Kleindorder, 2014).

There is also an amounting pile of evidence that implies that in utero experiences have impacts

on later cognitive development and even on language acquisition (Gervain, 2015). This section

will focus on the current evidence of prenatal learning and its implications on language

acquisition in infants.

Songbirds and Vocal Password Acquisition

Studying the ability of some species of songbirds to learn the specie specific songs has

been especially useful when studying sound acquisition. Similar to humans, songbirds are vocal

learners that have the ability to learn and reproduce the song of their species by mimicking

another member of their species (usually their mother). Additionally, songbirds and humans

“have parallel neural organization and developmental paths to acquire song or language,

including hemispheric lateralization and motor–auditory rehearsal systems” (Bolhuis, Okanoya,

& Scharff, 2010). In a 2014 study Colombelli-Negrel and colleagues studied prenatal learning in

a species of Australian songbirds (superb fairy-Wren) that are taught a vocal password by the

nursing female during their incubation. This password is later used by the infant birds to be

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

recognized by their mother (Colombelli-Negrel et al., 2014). The experimenters were able to

gage an embryo’s attentiveness to novel and familiar sounds by monitoring the fetal heart rate

(FHR) of the embryos. Lower heart rate has been found to be a physiological correlate of

attention. Their results showed that FHR was lower in response to the call from a novel

individual compared to the call from a familiar individual(Colombelli-Negrel et al., 2014).

These finding suggest the songbirds were more attentive in response to an unfamiliar

sound, which further implies that they have already learned and became familiar with the sounds

that they had previously been exposed to in the womb (Colombelli-Negrel et al., 2014). As

expected similar findings have been reported concerning auditory learning in human embryos.

Much like the techniques used in the songbird experiment, Kisilevsky and colleagues (2003)

researched the ability of human embryos to recognize familiar voices inside the womb by

measuring FHR. Similar to the results of the Australian songbird study, FHR was lower in

human embryos (indicating a more attentive state) when they were exposed to anovel voice

versus the voice of their mother. These results indicate that embryos have already acquired the

ability to discriminate between a new voice and the voice of their mother (Kisilevsky et al.,

2003).

Human Embryonic Learning

One of the most puzzling matters of human language acquisition is how much an infant

appear to “know” about language so shortly after birth. Embryos have the ability to hear roughly

between the 24th and 28th week of gestation, meaning that they have plenty of time within the

womb to perceive auditory signals from the outside world, such as from the voice of their own

mother (Gervain, 2015). To take this ability to hear a step further, embryos are able to be

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

cognitively influenced by auditory input in the womb, resulting in prenatal auditory learning that

gives rise to many of the auditory discrimination skills an infant appears to be equipped with at

birth (Gervain, 2015). Studies have proven that even newborn babies can discriminate between

familiar and novel voices, between male and female voices, and have shown preference to the

rhythmic structure of languages they heard in utereo. Even more interesting “newborns are able

to detect the acoustic cues that signal word boundaries, can discriminate words with different

patterns of lexical stress, and distinguish between function words (articles, pronouns,

prepositions, determiners, among others) and content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs,

among others) on the basis of their different acoustic characteristics” (Gervain, 2015). These

auditory alibies suggest that infants are already perceiving and discriminating sounds waves from

one another based off of their acoustic properties including pitch, loudness, and duration. This

conclusion implies that not only is auditory learning occurring in utero, but also that this learning

further influences or is even essential for further language development. In the following sections

I will hypothesis prenatal learning’s role in language acquisition, and position my argument

within current ideologies in the field of cognitive science.

The Continuum of Language Acquisition

Before detailing how the ability to acquire language is explained through prenatal

learning and development, I first will review several ideologies concerning the role of

representations and modularity in the mind. I will then propose how prenatal learning can result

in the building of auditory representations that can be employed in language acquisition,

especially in regards to the acquisition of a vocabulary.

Representation in the Mind

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

In many different cognitive domains the mind can be said to consist of representations

that correspond to abstract concepts. For instance, in regards to language, phonemes (the speech

sounds that are strung together to from morphemes) are representative of specific sounds. On a

slightly larger scale, morphemes or word units are representative of the abstract concepts they

come to refer to, such that the word cat acts as a mental representation for all concepts related to

what is a cat. In an extensive review of current theories surrounding mental representations,

Michelle Merrit (2008) questions how representations arise in the mind. Representational

nativism (RN) suggests that the mind comes innately predisposed with representations that allow

an infant to immediately start making sense of their environment. In regards to language this can

apply to Chomsky’s UG, which acts as the innate grammatical representations that an infant uses

to build and acquire a language’s grammar (Merrit, 2008). However, RN alone does not

sufficiently explain how abstract representations, such as those involved in belief fixation,

emerge. Merrit argues that “smaller, less complex, and nonlinguistic representations might be

encoded innately (thus endorsing RN), but only after a period of development—after interactions

between neurons, regions, even the outside environment— do complex representations emerge

(so RN is not the whole story)”. To explain how these interactions between regions occur Merrit

borrow from Fodor’s Modular theory. Modularity in the brain refers to a concept present by

Fodor (1983), which views the mind as being comprised of central systems (modules) that

process inputs within their specific domain. This view is based off of the fact that the brain is

known to have specialized structures for specific functions, such as the occipital lobe and visual

processing. Fodor theorized that the central modules in the mind are informationally

encapsulated meaning they can only process information in that domain using the representation

specific to that module. Other domain-general (peripheral) modules have the ability to inter relay

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

information from the central modules to give rise to more complex functioning (Fodor, 1983).

Merrit advises not to view mental processing as domain-specific or domain-general, and rather

proposes that “language, like social cognition, is explained neither by central processing nor

peripheral modules alone, but as a continuum between the two”. In this continuum some

representations will be innate and domain specific, but others due to their domain-generally and

complexity must be learned and require input from the environment (Merrit, 2008)

While I agree with Merrit’s view of the mind as a continuum, I wish to expand on her

argument by returning to a central concern of her paper that I believe did not get sufficiently

explained: how do representations arise in the brain? I concur that the newborn mind does appear

to have some sort of knowledge coded into representations; however, these representations need

not to be thought of as naturally equipped in the brain but can in fact be developed through

prenatal learning. The current evidence on prenatal learning’s ability to further influence a

child’s language development (such as preference for the language heard in the womb) supports

this claim. Thus, I wish to extend Merrit’s concept of the continuum of cognition to not just

apply from birth onwards, but from the moment an embryo is able to start perceiving sensations

and onward. The exact point when this happens in embryonic development is not known,

however, formation of the neural groove that will give rise to the brain begins developing in an

embryo as early as 3 weeks into pregnancy (Shahidullah & Hepper, 1994). Additionally, as

stated earlier hearing becomes functional between 24 and 28 weeks of gestation, meaning that an

embryo is perceiving and can be influenced by auditory stimuli quite early in their development

(Gervain, 2015).

Building Representations through Prenatal Learning

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

By combining this view of the mind as a continuum and the current evidence of prenatal

learning I propose that embryo exposure to auditory stimulus within the womb facilitates the

formation of mental representations of sounds, which can later be employed in the task of

language acquisition. First, an embryo gains the ability to receive and react to auditory input. The

stimuli can vary in pitch, loudness, and duration, and an embryo must develop a way to

discriminate the feature of one sound wave from another. Evidence has shown that embryo are

able to detect a change in sound between a pure tone of 250hz and one of 500hz as early as 27

weeks into gestation (Shahidullah & Hepper, 1994). Even more surprising, embryos can detect

the difference between the speech sounds [ba] and [bi] by the 35th week of gestation, indicating

that the ability to discriminate the basic acoustic features of an auditory stimuli arises early in

one’s developmental history (Shahidullah & Hepper, 1994).

Once an embryo is able to discriminate one piece of auditory stimuli from another based

off of the acoustic features of the stimuli, they can begin to segment a continuous sound wave

into units. These sound units come to be representational of all the features found in a unique

sound. At this time the embryo can also start to parse out what sounds often following each other

and the rhythm of a speech stream. Thus, at birth a newborn already has learned a great about

how to perceive and discriminate speech sound, which can explain why newborns have the

surprisingly complex voice discrimination abilities outlined above. Following birth, a newborn is

bombarded with stimuli from the outside world, an environment they are completely foreign to.

To make sense of it all they can use the representations that arose as a result of prenatal learning

and further build upon them. Next, I will focus on how these representations of different sounds

in the prenatal mind can be mobilized in the infant mind to give rise to language.

Building Language in the Mind

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

As detailed earlier, experiences within the womb equip an infant with the ability to parse

out information about the rhythm and melody typical of a speech stream, which eventually

allows for a newborn to segment the speech stream into sound units, and to a further extent word

units once the newborn recognizes the phonological features that indicate word boundaries

(Gervain, 2015). At this point, however, sound is just sound without any referential or linguistic

meaning. Once the child is born and placed within social contexts they can start to attach

referential meanings to these word units, eventually giving rise to what would be consider

morphemes (or words). This social learning is happening parallel to aural learn, thus as meaning

gets attached to sounds those sound and meaning are getting specified due to repeated exposure,

which allows the child to get better at discriminating what morphemes link to what meanings in

the social context. Social psychologist, Patricia Kuhl, asserts that social factors ‘gate’ language

acquisition in infants as it is in this context that words get associated to their communicative

meaning. This presumption can also explain how efficiently infants acquire speech as “learning

would be restricted to signals that derive from live humans rather than other sources” (Kuhl,

2010). Social learning can also explain why neurological disorders that affect social cognition,

such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, are often accompanied with language deficits.

Speech production enhances this process of language acquisition as the motor learning of

speech sounds allows for another domain of cognitive function to be attached to speech

production and perception. As it has been noted earlier, an infant starts perceiving speech sounds

as segmental units quite early on in their life; however, sufficient production of speech is not

seen in children until around 1 year of age, and even then they can only produce isolated words

and much more learning must be done before a child can start stringing together sentences. In

fact, it appears that an infant’s production of speech is essential in acquisition as there is an

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

explosion of vocabulary learning between 18 and 36 months of age, right when an infant begins

producing speech sound on their own (Kuhl, 2010). The essentialness of this motor aspect in

language communication can also explain how deaf children can acquire a language. Even

though they lack phonological units for speech, they can form motor units from signing, which

they can attach referential meaning to through social learning, and thus acquire a vocabulary of

signs.

A phonological loop may be the learning mechanism through which the connection of

phonological representations and their corresponding motor speech movements are made. The

phonological loop is “specialized for the retention of verbal information over short periods of

time; it comprises both a phonological store, which holds information in phonological form, and

a rehearsal process, which serves to maintain decaying representations in the phonological store”

(Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998). This mechanism can aid infants is vocabulary

acquisition as it allows them to store novel phonological forms they hear in a short term working

memory. This provides the child with the phonological representation of a speech sound that

they can use as they attempt to replicate the sound with their own motor speech mechanisms.

To observe the relationship between the phonological loop and vocabulary acquisition,

Susan Gathercole (2006) studied non-word repetition skills in young children. The ability of a

child to repeat multisyllabic non-words can provide insight into how a child can come to learn

novel words. At 2 years of age a child is able to repeat a non-word when prompted, and they can

do so surprisingly accurately. However, by 8 years of age a decline in the phonological accuracy

of non-word repetition has been observed (Gathercole, 2006). Gathercole suggests that young

children utilize the phonological loop mechanism to store novel word (and even non-words) in

their working memory. Communitive experience and repeated exposure to words results in the

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

consolidation of familiar words into the long term memory giving rise to one’s vocabulary. As

the words a child encounters become less and less novel and more familiar, the use of the

phonological loop decreases, which can lead to the decline in non-word repetition abilities

observed in 8 year olds (Gathercole, 2006). Interestingly, multilingual individual tend to perform

better at non-word repetition task indicating that being exposed to many different linguistic

stimuli can defer the decline in phonological loop performance, and enhance vocabulary learning

throughout one’s lifetime (Gathercole, 2006).

Conclusion

Recent developments in prenatal learning challenge Nativist thought as it would be unjust

to view cognitive development as starting from birth onward as learning does occur before birth.

It is more just to view language acquisition as a continual learning process that extends to the

first moment an embryo is able to start receiving and perceiving stimuli. Learning that happens

within the womb, specifically auditory learning, equips a newborn with the ability to

discriminate between sounds based off of their acoustic features. Furthermore, prenatal auditory

learning aids an infant in the task of breaking a continuous speech stream into specific sound

units based off of their phonological features. These sound units act as the representations that

language learning can be facilitated through. Intermingling between auditory cognition and

social cognition are essential in attaching referential meaning to speech sounds. Through the aid

of a phonological loop, an infant is able to replicate speech sounds with their own motor

mechanism, which adds a motor component to a phonological representation. The connections

between auditory, motor, and social domains within the mind give rise to multifaceted

representations that are utilized for vocabulary acquisition.

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Prenatal Learning and the Continuum of Language Acquisition

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