Your Baby Cries Her Momma’s Native Tongue

Ever been curious why your newborn baby already sounds like mom or dad?  One big reason is that scientists believes the baby learns, or picks up his/her mother’s accent from inside the womb.

IMG: Elizabeth Ferree

This would mean if dad were around with an equally strong accent he/she could be picking up two different accents before they utter their first breath.

According to Rueters:

Kathleen Wermke of the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, who conducted the study with French and American colleagues, said it showed newborns “are capable of producing different cry melodies” and that they prefer melodies in the pattern of the language they heard in the womb.

Wermke’s team recorded the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old.

Their analysis, published in journal Current Biology, revealed clear differences in the shape of the newborns’ cry melodies, based on their mother tongue.

Previous studies have shown that human fetuses can memorize sounds from the external world by the last three months of pregnancy and are particularly attuned to melodies in both music and language. Vocal imitation studies have also shown babies can match vowel sounds spoken by adults, but only from 12 weeks old.

Wermke’s team said their research showed an “extremely early” impact of native language and confirmed that babies’ cries are their first proper attempts to communicate specifically with their mothers.

You all know it is that first cry that we yearn to hear, try to see who the baby will take after. So now that everyone knows once again that babies do hear sounds from inside the womb how many will break out the classical mozart’s?