Babies understand even from the womb of the mother.
They listen to sounds and are influenced by it.
This has been noticed in Legends and Ithihasas of India.
In Mahabharata, Abhimanu learns of Chakra Vyuha when he was in the womb of his mother Subhadra and his father , after teaching him as to how to enter the Vyuha, leaves the bedside with out teaching how to get out.
Abhimany gets killed later in a War having entered the Vyuha and unable to come out of it.
Researches had indicated that babies could listen to the sounds.
Now it is understood that they can understand the accents of Mother and can distinguish between accents of languages.
Scroll down for Video.
Story:
Abstract
Aims
To test the hypothesis that exposure to ambient language in the womb alters phonetic perception shortly after birth. This two-country study aimed to see whether neonates demonstrated prenatal learning by how they responded to vowels in a category from their native language and another non-native language, regardless of how much postnatal experience the infants had.
Method
A counterbalanced experiment was conducted in Sweden (n = 40) and the USA (n = 40) using Swedish and English vowel sounds. The neonates (mean postnatal age = 33 h) controlled audio presentation of either native or non-native vowels by sucking on a pacifier, with the number of times they sucked their pacifier being used to demonstrate what vowel sounds attracted their attention. The vowels were either the English/i/or Swedish/y/in the form of a prototype plus 16 variants of the prototype.
Results
The infants in the native and non-native groups responded differently. As predicted, the infants responded to the unfamiliar non-native language with higher mean sucks. They also sucked more to the non-native prototype. Time since birth (range: 7–75 h) did not affect the outcome.
Conclusion
The ambient language to which foetuses are exposed in the womb starts to affect their perception of their native language at a phonetic level. This can be measured shortly after birth by differences in responding to familiar vs. unfamiliar vowels.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.12098/abstract