--- Robert Seeberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > The day my son was born, he reacted to my voice and > my wife's voice, but not > to anyone else's. It was quite shocking when it > happened, and that > "standard" look of shock and recognition on his face > when he heard our > voices caught everyone by surprise. > > Up to that point I had thought her insistence that I > talk to her swollen > belly every night, beyond ridiculous. But I must > admit that she might have been correct all along.
Development of maternal (and I'll assume paternal, but those studies haven't been formally done! [1]) voice recognition is a function of advancing memory ability in the fetus; preemies don't have it as well as full-terms. ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12325136&dopt=Abstract Tune recognition can occur sometime after 30 weeks' gestational age, if daily exposure occurs (but if re-exposure doesn't occur post-birth, the 21+day-old newborn seems to "forget" the learned tune): http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/hepper1/ Oh, this is interesting -- this paper argues that language evolved from *musicality* -- the whales would approve! http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/ORILA.FIN.html "Song (musicality, singing capacity), we argue, underlies both the evolutionary origin of human language and its development during early childhood. Specifically, we propose that language acquisition depends upon a Music Acquiring Device (MAD) which has been doubled into a Language Acquiring Device (LAD) through memetic evolution. Thus, in opposition to the currently most prominent language origin hypotheses (Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct, W. Morrow, N.Y.; Deacon, T.W. 1997. The Symbolic Species, W.W. Norton, N.Y.), we contend that language itself was not the underlying selective force which lead to better speaking individuals through natural selection. Instead we suggest that language emerged from the combination of (i) natural selection for increasingly better mental representation abilities during animal evolution (thinking, mental syntax) and (ii) natural selection during recent human evolution for the human ability to sing, and finally (iii) memetic selection that only recently (within the last 100,000 years) reused these priorly evolved abilities to create language. Thus, speech - the use of symbolic sounds linked grammatically - is suggested to be largely a cultural phenomenon, linked to the Upper Palaeolithic revolution. The ability to sing provided the physical apparatus and neural respirational control that is now used by speech. The ability to acquire song became the means by which children are able to link animal mental syntax with syntax of spoken language. Several studies strongly indicate that this is achieved by children through a melody-based recognition of intonation, pitch, and melody sequencing and phrasing. Language, we thus conjecture, owes its existence not to innate language learning competencies, but to innate music-associated ones, which - unlike the competencies hypothesized for language - can be straightforwardly explained to have evolved by natural selection..." I'd guess that prenatal recognition of maternal voice occurs in many if not most social animals, as it would have a high survival value for babies like seals, geese and herd animals (I wonder if near-term whale and dolphin babies sonar-cast? Do mother cetaceans 'hear' their soon-to-be-born offspring? Mother alligators do, although of course theirs are in nest-mounds.). However, a tiny (N=9) study in seal pups found that they took 2-5 days to recognize their mother's voice: http://www.cb.u-psud.fr/cb/Nature.pdf A study of piglets found that they distinguish their mother's voice from other sows at less than 2 days old: http://link.springer-ny.com/link/service/journals/10211/fpapers/esc/contents/02/00071/paper/s10211-002-0071-4ch100.html Other forms of prenatal learning (habituation, classical conditioning) have been demonstrated in small studies with frogs, ducks, rats and humans (one guy used a car horn as the noxious stimulus!). Debbi who bets that the mother cat's umble-equivalent is recognized by her newborn kittens ;) [1] Well, there was an old small study that found "no significant" response of the newborn to paternal voice, but I don't think that most US fathers of decades ago talked to their wives' 3rd trimester bellies...so if a proper study was done now, results should show recognition! __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
