Research Design In Babies Listen And Learn While In The Womb?

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In various movies and TV films, such as Friends, Juno, and Baby Mama, filmmakers have depicted people talking to the belly of a pregnant woman. Most of the time, it is portrayed in order to add humor to the scene. Although, a baby can hear his mother; not only can the baby hear his mother, but also learn the language she speaks to him. According to Denise Mann in “Babies Listen and Learn While in the Womb,” a mother gives “her son [child] a foundation for language development” (2013). As a mother, pre-birth care is vital to the development of a child. Babies begin to absorb the language their mother speaks “during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy” (Mann 2013). We’ve always known babies can hear sounds, but what is special about the mother’s voice? …show more content…

This experiment is similar to a correlational design, however, the subjects in this experiment were chosen specifically because of the language they had been predisposed to; their characteristics were extremely similar. Moon compared preexisting “treatments,” the languages they were exposed to before birth. This research design gives a real world sense in terms of how a baby would react if they were to hear a language they had not been exposed to prior. This is a major strength of the natural experiment design. Although, Moon still determined a relationship between the variables; the variables being the language babies were susceptible to before being born and how they reacted to the vowels in each. A limitation of the natural experiment is that the findings may be caused by things other than the language they were exposed to. Moon states that “Additional studies will be necessary to examine whether the results reported here can be generalized to other vowels and languages” (2013). The findings of this research article support the hypothesis that babies are familiar with the language they are predisposed to. Moon writes, “The effect of language experience was significant (F1,75 = 4.95, p = 0.029), with a greater number of sucks overall during the non-native (MNon-native = 7.1, SD = 2.9) than during the native language (MNative = 6.5, SD = 3.3). The results show that the native prototype and its variants received fewer sucking responses than the non-native prototype and its variants” (2013). This supports the idea that babies understand language. They have already started the process of learning language. The news article does report that it is important to keep in mind that the language we speak to a pregnant belly affects the language foundation of the baby. Mann’s article correctly presents the information of the research article. We must keep in mind that babies are aware of language they are

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