Children | Mother

THE UNBORN
Anthony DeCasper is a psychologist at the University of North Carolina; his experiments have sought to determine which sounds a newborn baby prefers. A report in Science ’84 describes his procedure “To test his theory that babies would probably choose to hear their mothers’ voices, for example, he gave each baby a nipple hooked up to a tape recorder. One sucking pattern, such as a series of slow sucks, would turn on a tape of its mother’s voice. Another pattern, such as a burst of fast sucks, gave the baby a tape of another woman’s voice. The babies quickly learned to suck so as to hear their mothers.” In another test babies showed a clear preference for the sound of their mother’s heartbeat over the sound of a man’s voice. As reported in Evangelical Newsletter, report in Science ’84 was written by Gina Kolata.