Did anyone else here play Day of the Tentacle? If so, is this reminding you of reading from Bernard’s textbook to put people and animals to sleep? I’ll try this after she’s born, maybe it will work…
I’d imagine your voice sounds a lot different when it’s heard from inside of you, not to mention that babies are submerged in a liquid while in the uterus. I have serious doubts they could recognize their mother’s voice once they are born.
I’ve seen reputable research (don’t have link handy, sorry) that indicates that newborns can indeed pick out their mother from her voice alone. They apparently can also differentiate between “nonsense babble” and real language. It seems that we begin to learn the elements of language before we are even born…it’s that important to the species.
So have I - I took a couple of developmental linguistics courses for my degree and this topic was covered.
I chose to not site the particular studies I’ve read in a bid to keep the thread light.
Fat chance around here. 
I talked to my daughter a lot before she was born. I would tell her anything from, “It is too hot today!” to reading her pages from whatever book I was reading at the time. I asked her lots of questions about stuff that involved her too. “What do we want for dinner tonight? You hated alfredo sauce last time we tried that so we’ll skip the chicken alfredo. What’s that? You want pizza? Excellent, mommy happens to love pizza!” And then my husband would step in and remind me that just because I was pregnant didn’t mean I could eat pizza for 3 meals a day so the baby and I would toss other ideas around until we settled on something we liked.
I wonder if “they” advise talking to the unborn baby believing it helps baby development or because they think it helps maternal development … getting in the habit of keeping up the monologue and getting a head start on bonding?
This.
At least your baby lets you have pizza for breakfast. Normally, I love pizza for breakfast, but now it makes me queasy. 
I’m really, really, really hoping I go back to being able to eat pizza and Chinese food for breakfast after the baby is born, since they’re so much yummier than traditional breakfast foods.
When knocked up with Junior, he decided that I was never going to eat chocolate again. I LOOOOOOVE chocolate. I even tried to get over my (baby induced) revulsion and ate a piece or two, only to promptly throw it right up again.
Junior is almost two, and as my hips can attest, I have no problem making a huge shwank of myself on chocolate now!
Weirdly (at least in my head) Junior loves the stuff as well. 
You guys are missing the point. The idea of talking to your unborn baby is so you get used to the experience of talking to a child who is not listening to a word you’re saying. You’ve got around eighteen years of that ahead of you.
I’ve got almost eight years experience of talking to cats who don’t listen. Is it anything like that?
Yes. Cats are more polite about it.
I always pretended the cats were talking back to me, made up dumb voices for them, and narrated ridiculous conversations. I have also done that for all our babies both pre-and-post birth. It bothered me briefly that I used the same voices for the cats and the kids, but not for long. 
I’m now at the point where I natter a lot, narrating, and it’s much less embarrassing when I have kids with me. Of course, I’m almost never alone right now, so the embarrassment is minimal.
Whatever you want. If I can talk to my dog and my cat and even myself with no problem, why not a baby?
That seems to be a pretty common subject with the mothers-to-be I’ve known… “hey you, cut it out, we’re not in the penalty round!” has to be one of the most commonly-used lines, and not necessarily from mothers who like soccer. They tap on the area the kid has hit to ellicit further movement, or massage it if they want it to stop.
Others tell the baby what they’re doing: “now I’m going to take a bath, let’s see, is the water warm yet? Oh no, it’s too hot! OK, so let’s open the cold water…”
Pretty much the same things people talk about to a newborn who so far can only eat, uneat, sleep and make faces.
You can tell her who her real father is.
Not just bonding but brain development, language acquisition, and future academic success. I heard about a study on an NPR broadcast a couple years ago where researchers counted the words mothers or caregivers spoke to their babies and the more educated women yakked all day long to the infants, while in other homes the babies were given the silent treatment. It was a remarkably accurate indicator of the future of the child.
Another study says books in the home. So have lots of those too. 
Bills, global warming, etc. It’s important to set expectations.
Just remember that they work better if the kid sees someone reading them, as opposed to being decorative items that grubby baby hands should never approach.
You think they’re going to start listening at eighteen?