Of all the senses, hearing is the one that comes online earliest. Long before seeing a face clearly, a baby hears, sorts and memorises sounds. Understanding that timeline changes the way we talk to them and how we arrange their sound environment.
An ear that works before birth
The cochlea, the organ of hearing, becomes functional during the second trimester of pregnancy. The foetus then perceives low-frequency sounds transmitted through the mother's tissues.
What they hear above all is rhythm: the heartbeat, breathing, the prosody of their mother's voice. High frequencies are largely filtered out by the fluid environment.
What a newborn already recognises
At birth, a baby prefers their mother's voice to a stranger's. They also distinguish the melody of their native language from that of a foreign one.
This preference is not anecdotal. It means several weeks of auditory learning have already taken place before the first day of life.
Newborn screening
In France, screening for permanent neonatal hearing loss is offered in maternity units. It is painless, takes a few minutes and is most often carried out while the baby sleeps.
The main stages from 0 to 3 years
Hearing is not simply a matter of perceiving sound. The brain has to learn to locate, separate and interpret what it receives.
From birth to six months
A newborn startles at loud noises and settles at familiar voices. Around three to four months, they turn their head towards a sound source to the side.
That localisation requires comparing what each ear hears. It is a cortical calculation the baby refines over months.
From six months to one year
Babbling appears and takes shape. The baby repeats syllables, modulates their voice and listens to themselves producing sounds.
In parallel, their ear specialises in the sounds of their own language. They gradually become less sensitive to phonetic contrasts absent from their environment.
From one to three years
The child can now isolate a voice against background noise, though less well than an adult. A noisy environment therefore demands real listening effort from them.
How to support this development day to day
The point is not to stimulate more, but more accurately. A crowded sound environment tires attention instead of feeding it.
Talking, singing, naming
The human voice remains the best auditory material. Narrating what you are doing, singing the same nursery rhymes, naming objects, all build the link between sound and meaning.
This work directly prepares the way into language, which we detail in our article on language development from 0 to 3 years.
Turning down the background noise
A television left on continuously masks voices and makes sound discrimination harder. Switching off background noise during times of exchange remains one of the most effective habits.
Varying sound materials
Wood, fabric and metal do not sound the same. A floor play space lets the child produce these sounds themselves and observe the effect.
That is also one of the benefits of a floor play mat: a stable surface where the child taps, rolls things and listens entirely on their own.
One sense among others
Hearing never works alone. It coordinates with vision and with touch to build a coherent representation of the world.
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