The Cries of a Newborn May Reflect Parents’ Language

We all know how exciting it is to hear our baby’s first words, but they could come a little sooner than we think. The cries of an infant, as young as three days old, already show similarity to the language their parents speak, according to the new study that compared the cries of German-born and French-born children.

Kathleen Wermke, Ph.D., who is a medical anthropologist at the University of Wurzburg in Wurzburg, Germany, and one of the researchers of the new study, said that it is already well known by experts that parental voices, especially the mother’s, are perceived in utero and memorized, as are other sounds, such as a simple musical melody. So, what has this new study added? “The surrounding language seems to affect infants’ sound production much earlier than researchers thought,” says Wermke.  The new research suggests that well before babies begin to coo, babble, or say “Mama” or “Dada,” they have already picked up on the pattern of their native language which comes out through their cries.

In this study, Wermke and her colleagues analyzed and recorded the newborn cries of 60 healthy infants when they were between 3 and 5 days old. Half of the infants had been born into French-speaking families and the other half into German-speaking families. All of the infants have normal hearing and were carried full term. The infants’ cries occurred naturally and were not stimulated or elicited by the research team.

The infants that were born into French families tended to cry with a pattern that language and speech experts call a rising melody contour, which goes from low to high and the German infants typically cried with a falling melody contour, which goes from high to low. Wermke found that the cry patterns of the infants were consistent with the patterns of their parents’ native languages.

The results of the study showed that the newborns “not only have memorized the main intonation patterns of their respective surrounding language but are also able to reproduce these patterns in their own production,” the research team reported.  Although previous studies have found that a child’s native language affects the sounds that are produced at 7 to 18 months, the new study suggests that the impact happens much earlier.

Wermke stated that imitating the melody contours of language does not depend on a mature vocal tract, which newborns due not have, but rather on the ability to coordinate the systems for making sounds and breathing, which they do have.

After reviewing the study, the research suggests that the influence of the surrounding language on infants happens earlier than experts previously have thought, said Diane Paul, PhD, who is a speech-language pathologist and director of clinical issues in speech-language pathology for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in Rockville, MD. She also noted, “The capacity to learn language is inborn, and it’s shaped by what [infants] hear in the environment." The recent study is stating, “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.”