The window for sounds

Your baby's ear is already listening for Arabic

Young babies are, in a sense, citizens of the world: they can tell apart the sounds of every language on earth, even ones no one around them speaks. Kuhl (2004) describes how, over the first year, a baby's brain starts tuning itself to the specific sounds it hears most — the ability to notice sound differences it never hears begins to narrow.

This tuning starts even earlier than birth. In a classic study, DeCasper & Fifer (1980) found that newborns, just hours old, already preferred their mother's voice over a stranger's — showing that the sounds a baby hears before birth are already being learned. Every bit of Arabic your baby hears now, even a lullaby hummed under your breath, is feeding that early tuning.