Babies Learn in Womb, Cry with Accent
November 8, 2009 by Peggy Rowland
Filed under Women's Health
You have more influence on those first sounds coming from your baby than you might think! New research suggests that infants start learning elements of their first language in the womb. That’s long before they make their first coos.
According to a new study published in Current Biology, a baby’s first cries carry an accent. French infants don’t cry the same way as German infants. For the study, researchers compared recordings of 30 French and 30 German infants that were between two and five days old. The languages are very different since French words often have a stress at the end, while that’s opposite in German.
Newborns from France frequently produced “rising crying tones”, while German babies used a “falling intonation.” The cries reflect the differing intonation patterns between the languages. Researchers think these differences are perceived in the uterus and are later reproduced.
Angela Friederici, one of the Directors at the Max Planck Institute, said that while hearing in the uterus is restricted due to the amniotic fluid, “What gets through are primarily the melodies and intonation of the respective language.” Researchers believe that this learned melody provides the foundation for learning language. Babies don’t have to start completely from scratch.
While scientists had previously known that native language exposure influenced infants, they didn’t realize that sound production was influenced as early as the first days of life.
The researchers for this study include Birgit Mampe of the University of Wurzburg in Germany, Angela D. Friederici of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, Anne Christophe of the Ecole Normale Superieure/CNRS in France, and Kathleen Wermke of the University of Wurzburg.
(Image via MorgueFile)
