It takes a newborn a little longer to recognize its mother by her face. Since there’s no way a baby can come into the world already armed with the knowledge of what its mother looks like, it has to learn this after birth by matching the mother’s voice to the face it’s coming from. At one month, infants can match their mother’s voice to her face. They prove it by looking at the mother’s face, and ignoring the face of another woman sitting by her side, when a tape-recording of the mother’s voice is played. After about three months, an infant can pick out its mother by sight alone.
One might think the newborn could have learned a preference for its mother’s voice while bonding with the mother just after birth. But it goes deeper than that. In an experiment in which pregnant mothers read a certain story out loud once a week for the last six weeks of pregnancy, their newborns turned out to prefer that story to others. Another study showed that when pregnant women sing a certain melody once a day during the last two weeks of pregnancy, the babies prefer that melody to an unfamiliar one after they’re born.
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