How A Newborn Baby Can Communicate Even Before Speaking

Can babies learn to communicate with body language before birth? Thanks to modern technology we can know see for the first time what is actually happening to a baby in the womb before birth. Ultra sound scans and other methods of looking at the baby in the womb have shown that babies can react to all sorts of stimulation and also initiate movements and reactions which express the baby's needs, interest and feelings.Did you know that twins have been shown to have ‘body language' with each other? They have been shown holding hands, kissing, playing, kicking and hitting each other. Ultrasound has shown that at between 16-18 weeks, during amniocentesis tests, babies heart rates have increased and some babies have been shown to ‘attack' the needle as if trying to protect themselves. Some babies have withdrawn from their normal activity rate for hours or even days after the test.  And amazingly, did you know some babies have been heard crying in the womb if air gets to the larynx in a process called ‘vagitus uterinus'.At birth the newborn baby has a huge range of body language, facial expressions and gestures. The newborn baby clearly communicates their feelings and reacts to what is happening around them by actions such as contortions of the face, movements of the arms. legs and body, changing color from angry red to worrying blue if angry or frustrated and happy coos and gurgles.A newborn baby has already begun to learn language in the womb. It has been shown using something called acoustic spectrograph that the cry of a newborn baby already has rhythms, patterns and other speech features which can be matched to their mother voice!A newborn baby shows a preference for listening to adults speaking its mother tongue rather than a foreign one.  A newborn baby can match a sound track to the face speaking it showing lip reading skills. And a newborn can read a face so well that they can imitate a wide open mouthed expression, a sticking out tongue, and mimic expressions such as sadness, happiness and surprise.These responses to the environment have been seen from just ten weeks of gestational age. And it proves that humans arrive in this world well equipped for verbal and non-verbal communication with others long before formal language is learned. It is up to us to pay attention to this means of communication and to respond to their newborn baby with sensitivity and understanding.