Babies in the womb eavesdrop on life outside it. Researchers now tell us that they seem to come into the world already primed to be social, to want human interaction. They prefer looking at faces, or patterns that seem like faces; they can recognise familiar voices, especially their mothers'; and they can recognise the sounds and speech patterns of the languages they overheard before birth.
During their first year babies babble, using the sounds of every world language. Yet by the time they are one year old they make only the sounds of the languages they hear around them. Once out in the world, they are intensely interested in the people around them and how they interact with each other. They are scientists working out 'how we behave here'.
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