Babies cry in different languages

5^th November 2009  The cries of infants as young as three days old already reflect the language their parents speak, according to a new study that compared the newborn cries of French and German-born children.

Experts already knew that babies in the womb get to know voices, especially a mother's, and the babies can memorise these and other sounds, like simple musical melodies, says researcher Dr Kathleen Wermke, a medical anthropologist at the University of Wurzburg in Germany.

However, this new study published online in Current Biology goes further, she says. "The surrounding language seems to affect infants' sound production much earlier than researchers thought."

The new research suggests that well before babies coo, babble, or say "Mama" or "Dada", they have already picked up the pattern of their native language, and it comes out in their cries.

Newborn cries: Study details

In the study, Dr Wermke and her colleagues recorded and analysed the newborn cries of 60 healthy infants when they were just three to five days old. Half had been born into French-speaking families and half into German-speaking families. All had normal hearing and were full-term babies.

The cries occurred naturally and weren't elicited or stimulated by the researchers.

The French babies tended to cry with a pattern that speech and language experts call a rising melody contour, which goes from low to high. The German babies typically cried with a falling melody contour, which goes from high to low. The melody contour includes such components as intonation. The cry patterns of the babies, Dr Wermke found, were consistent with the patterns of their native languages.

Newborn crying study: What it means

The study results, Dr Wermke and her colleagues report, show that the newborns ''not only have memorised the main intonation patterns of their respective surrounding language, but are also able to reproduce these patterns in their own production''.

Although other studies have found that a child's native language affects the sounds produced at seven to 18 months, the new study suggests the impact happens much earlier.

Imitating the melody contours of a language doesn't depend on a mature vocal tract, Dr Wermke says, which newborns don't have, but rather on the ability to coordinate the systems for breathing and making sounds, which they do have.

Newborn crying study: Second opinion

We asked Dr Diane Paul, a speech and language pathologist and director of clinical issues in speech-language pathology for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, to review the study. She says it suggests that the influence of the surrounding language on babies happens earlier than experts previously have thought.

''The capacity to learn language is inborn, and it's shaped by what [infants] hear in the environment," she says. The new study is saying that ''even before birth, the differences between languages are being heard, the babies are hearing the different melodic patterns, and they are born with the pattern that is more closely related to the melodic pattern they have heard in the language around them".