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Language learning may start in womb
Nov. 6, 2009
Courtesy Cell Press
and World Science staff
From their first days,
babies cry differently depending on the language their parents speak—showing some learning has already started in the womb, according to a new study. From their first days, newborns cry differently depending on the language their parents speak—showing some learning has already started in the womb, according to a new study.
(Image courtesy Vt. Dept. of Children & Families)
Newborns are capable of “different cry melodies,” and they
tend to produce “melody patterns... typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester,” said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany, one of the scientists involved.
“These data support the importance of human infants’ crying for seeding language development.”
The findings were published online Nov. 5 in the research journal
Current Biology.
Human fetuses can memorize sounds from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language, earlier studies found. Newborns prefer their mother’s voice over others
and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation in maternal speech.
Their preference for the surrounding language and ability to
tell apart different languages and pitch changes are based primarily on melody, Wermke said.
Although prenatal exposure to native language was known to influence newborns’ perception, scientists had thought that the surrounding language affected sound production much later, the researchers said, but it now seems that’s not so.
Wermke’s team recorded and analyzed 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. French newborns tended to cry with a rising melody contour, whereas German newborns seemed to prefer a falling melody contour in their crying. Those patterns are consistent with characteristic differences between the two languages, Wermke said.
This imitation of language “melody contour” by infants doesn’t depend on skills in articulation, which tend to develop a few months after birth, the scientists said.
“Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behavior in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding,” they wrote. “Because melody contour may be the only aspect of their mother’s speech that newborns are able to imitate, this might explain why we found melody contour imitation at that early age.”
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From their first days, newborns cry differently depending on the language their parents speak—showing some learning has already started in the womb, according to a new study. That suggests babies start picking up elements of what will be their first language in the womb, say the researchers, who published their findings online Nov. 5 in the research journal Current Biology. Newborns are “capable of producing different cry melodies,” and “prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester,” said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany, one of the scientists involved. “These data support the importance of human infants’ crying for seeding language development.” Human fetuses can memorize sounds from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language, earlier studies found. Newborns prefer their mother’s voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech. Their perceptual preference for the surrounding language and their ability to distinguish between different languages and pitch changes are based primarily on melody, Wermke said. Although prenatal exposure to native language was known to influence newborns’ perception, scientists had thought that the surrounding language affected sound production much later, the researchers said, but it now seems that’s not so. Wermke’s team recorded and analyzed 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. The analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the newborns’ cry melodies, based on their mother tongue, said the group. French newborns tend to cry with a rising melody contour, whereas German newborns seem to prefer a falling melody contour in their crying. Those patterns are consistent with characteristic differences between the two languages, Wermke said. This imitation of language “melody contour” by infants doesn’t depend on skills in articulation, which tend to develop a few months after birth, the scientists said. “Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behavior in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding,” they wrote. “Because melody contour may be the only aspect of their mother’s speech that newborns are able to imitate, this might explain why we found melody contour imitation at that early age.”