Babies May Pick Up Language Cues in Womb
(NPR, November 6, 2009)
The next report is about an incredibly compelling sound that you probably would assume is pretty much the same all over the world. (baby crying) Turns out the sound of a newborn baby’s cry may actually depend on the language spoken by its parents. NPR’s Nell Greenfield Boyce reports.
Different languages all have their own particular rhythms and intonations. You can hear this even if you don’t understand what’s being said. Let’s say you suddenly switch to a French radio station…. Or a German one…. Well, newborns can hear this difference too.
And a new study suggests that when they’re crying, they actually try to imitate the general sound of their parents’ language. Kathleen Wermke is a researcher at the University of Würtzburg in Germany. She says a colleague recently went to the maternity ward of a hospital in Paris. “And she recorded the cries directly after the babies were born during the first days of life.” She recorded 30 French babies, and these cries were compared to ones previously recorded from 30 German babies. Altogether the research team analyzed the sounds of over 1,000 cries. Wermke says they discovered something interesting. French babies seem to prefer to cry with a rising melody, like this…. “That’s the French one.” But German babies preferred a falling melody…. Wermke says this makes sense because the German language typically has a falling melody at the end of phrases, while in French there’s a pitch rise. “In general it seems that the babies recognize and perceive those melodic differences in their mother tongue and are able to reproduce that in their own crying.”
She cautions that both groups of babies could and did produce all types of cries. “So it would be stupid, of course, that we say, OK, that they always cry in this typical French pattern. Of course not.” But the results of this study in the journal Current Biology revealed that overall the French and German infants had patterns of crying that mirrored their parents’ language.
“Very often we think, ‘Oh, the baby’s crying. Oh, this is really frustrating. I don’t want him to cry. And I think we should be more aware that crying is a language itself, and the baby is really trying to communicate with us.”
The study impressed Toben Mintz. He’s a researcher at the University of Southern California who studies how kids learn language. He says scientists knew from earlier work that newborns do recognize the acoustic patterns of their native language. “But what is really novel about this study is showing that they can actually produce these patterns in their cries.” Months before they’d be doing anything like babbling, which has been considered to be the first true linguistic utterances.
Mintz says he has kids, but never searched their early cries for hints of language mimicry. “That’s not what I was thinking about when they were crying. Certainly when they were very young, it never entered my mind that that would be even a possibility.” He says newborns must have a surprising degree of vocal control to be able to reproduce sound patterns that they probably first heard in the womb. Nell Greenfield Boyce, NPR News.