An Amzing Fact......

This is really quite amazing for me to read this article.....

Here's why....

My folks used to tell me to always speak to my children while still in the womb of their mother....my mother is 92, going on 93, May 29, and she still believes unborn babies can tell what their language is and they can also identify their parents, just by the sound of their voices.

I find this article amazing because these old people and their parents understood these concepts about the unborn and advised them to speak to them, and they passed it down to us.....our elders were amazing people, because they already knew something these modern day scientists are just now discovering....

My little girl of seven years now, started speaking this Potawatomi language at a young age because I followed what I was told to do by my parents; I spoke to her while she was in her mom's womb, a lot.

I believe that is why she learned what she knows today....I am speaking

of why she knows how to pronounce even the difficult words, and has our accent and rhythm of our language down so pat....

Amazing, is all I can say.....that these people have stumbled upon yet another fact our elders already knew....



Enjoy this article folks.....and the fact your forefathers were some pretty incredible people.....



THE ARTCLE........


While still in the womb, babies already start to learn language by hearing the rhythm of the language, says Bardutz.

Photograph by: Thinkstock, canada.com

Children start to learn language even before they’re born, neurolinguist Holly Bardutz is teaching students in her language acquisition class at the University of Regina.

While still in the womb, babies already start to learn language by hearing the rhythm of the language, says Bardutz.

To recreate what it’s like in the womb, and what a baby might hear, Bardutz asked her students to spend class time in the university’s pool, with their ears under water, listening to people above ground speaking in various languages, including Urdu (which is spoken in India), Spanish, Chinese, Dutch, English, French and Korean.

“What we’re looking for is the rhythm of the language,” Bardutz explained.

Not only does the rhythm vary depending on the language, but also depending on whether the language is being spoken, sung or read.

“And reading from a textbook is different than reading a Dr. Seuss (book), which has more rhythm,” she pointed out.

An unborn child’s hearing is fully developed by 36 weeks, Bardutz said. A full-term baby is born at 40 weeks.

“So usually the last three or four weeks while they’re in the uterus, they have fully developed hearing,” she said.

“And the uterus is a watery substance, so that’s why we’re coming to the pool,” Bardutz explained.

“When babies are born — even at four hours old — right at birth, they can already identify their own language,” she said. “They can tell if what they’re hearing is English or Chinese. They don’t know the language, but they can recognize their own language.”

The only languages in which newborn babies can’t hear a difference in rhythms are Dutch and English, Bardutz pointed out. “Because it’s exactly the same rhythm.”

At least, that’s what the class textbook says, she said. Much to Bardutz’s delight, her third-year linguistics class willingly participated in testing that theory.

Seven of the 18 students in the class hooked their legs onto the side of the pool and put their ears under water so they could listen to people above the surface speak in different languages.

Ishrat Naqvi, a retired physics professor, spoke in Urdu, which he described as the official language of Pakistan. Urdu was the first language Naqvi learned.

Iris Mi and Callie Li, both business administration students at the U of R, conversed in Chinese for the linguistics students.

Keith Murch, who finished a linguistics degree last year and is currently studying education, participated both in and out of the pool.

“First of all, you have to be comfortable with being back in the womb,” he said.

Once he got comfortable in the pool, tuned out any distracting mechanical noises and concentrated on the rhythm of the voices, “it was a very interesting experience,” Murch said. “That was fascinating stuff!”

Sonja Van Eijk volunteered to shift back and forth between speaking Dutch and English.

“It’s really quite amazing,” she said, referring to the two languages having the same rhythm.

Intrigued by what the students were hearing underwater, Van Eijk said: “I would really like to experience that myself. I think this evening I’m going to go take a dip in my bathtub.

“My husband is a linguist, so he speaks many languages. And we’re going to do the tests ourselves. I’m curious now. I really want to know if that’s true that you can’t hear the difference (between Dutch and English),” she added.

Many of the students in her class are working toward degrees in linguistics or psychology.

“A lot of them want to be speech pathologists,” Bardutz said. “They’re very interested in how kids learn language.”

People trying to revitalize their native languages shouldn’t wait to start until kids are in kindergarten, Bardutz emphasized.

“They’ve missed the critical time. The kids need to hear the language starting at before birth,” she said. “The earlier the better.”

NIn se Neaseno.