Newborn babies cry in their parents’ language

We all know how exciting it is to hear a baby's first words. But the cries of babies just 3 days old already show similarities with their parents' speech, according to a new study comparing the cries of German and French newborns.

Kathleen Wermke, a medical anthropologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany and one of the researchers, says experts already knew that babies remember their parents' voices, especially the mother's, from the womb, along with other sounds such as simple melodies. So what does the new study add? "The surrounding language seems to influence babies' sound production much earlier than researchers thought," she says. Before babies start to babble or say mama or papa, they have already picked up sounds from their native language, and it shows in their cries.

Wermke and colleagues recorded and analysed the cries of 60 newborns aged 3 to 5 days. Half were born into French-speaking families and half into German-speaking families. All had normal hearing, and the cries were spontaneous, not prompted by the research team.

Babies born to French families tended to cry with a rising melody, from low to high, matching the pattern of that language, while German babies cried with a falling melody, high then low. The babies' cry patterns matched the patterns of their parents' native language.

"Newborns not only memorise the main intonation patterns of the language around them but are able to reproduce them in their own way," the team reported. Earlier studies had found that babies are influenced by their native language from 7 to 18 months, but the new study suggests it happens much earlier.

Imitating the melody of a language doesn't depend on a mature vocal tract, which newborns don't have, but on the ability to coordinate breathing and sound production, which they do have, Wermke said.

The research suggests that the surrounding language affects babies earlier than thought, said Diane Paul, director of clinical issues in speech-language pathology at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in Rockville, Maryland. She noted that the ability to learn language is inherited but shaped by what the baby hears: even before birth, babies hear the differences between languages and their melodies, and they are born with the pattern most linked to the melody of the language around them.