The role of prenatal language experience in early language development

Infants acquire their native language surprisingly fast. By age 3, typically developing children are exciting conversational partners. The amazingly efficient mechanisms of language learning have been investigated for over half a century, and many have been well described. Even though babies start hearing while still in the womb and thus encounter language for the first time prenatally, this earliest phase of language acquisition has received less attention so far. This study reviews the relevant theoretical background, including the discussion of the key experimental studies related to the presented phenomena. Subsequently, it describes the goals of the current research by empirically examining newborns’ linguistic abilities and proposes a new model of language acquisition based on the overall findings.