Question by stacy heart: babies being born with accents do you think this?
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Page last updated at 10:38 GMT, Friday, 6 November 2009
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Babies ‘cry in mother’s tongue’
Crying newborn
Babies’ cries imitate their mother tongue as early as three days old
German researchers say babies start to choose up the nuances of their parents’ accents although still in the womb.
The researchers studied the cries of 60 wholesome babies born to families speaking French and German.
The French newborns cried with a rising “accent” while the German babies’ cries had a falling inflection.
Writing in the journal Existing Biology, they say the babies are most likely trying to form a bond with their mothers by imitating them.
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The findings suggest that unborn babies are influenced by the sound of the initial language that penetrates the womb.
Cry melodies
It was already recognized that foetuses could memorise sounds from the outside globe in the last three months of pregnancy and had been especially sensitive to the contour of the melody in both music and human voices.
Earlier studies had shown that infants could match vowel sounds presented to them by adult speakers, but only from 12 weeks of age.
Kathleen Wermke from the University of Wurzburg, who led the investigation, mentioned: “The dramatic locating of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing distinct cry melodies, but they prefer to generate those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their foetal life.
Newborns are extremely motivated to imitate their mother’s behaviour in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding
Kathleen Wermke, Unversity of Wurzburg
“Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the significance of human infants’ crying for seeding language development.”
Dr Wermke’s team recorded and analysed the cries of 60 healthy newborns when they were 3 to five days old.
Their analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the infants’ cry melodies that corresponded to their mother tongue.
They say the babies need only nicely-co-ordinated respiratory-laryngeal systems to imitate melody contours and not the vocal control that develops later.
Dr Wermke stated: “Newborns are extremely motivated to imitate their mother’s behaviour in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding.
“Due to the fact melody contour might be the only aspect of their mother’s speech that newborns are able to imitate, this may explain why we identified melody contour imitation at that early age.”
Debbie Mills, a reader in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Bangor University, stated: “This is truly intriguing simply because it suggests that they are producing sounds they have heard in the womb and that indicates understanding and that it is not an innate behaviour.
“Many of the early infant behaviours are virtually like reflexes that go away soon after the initial month and then come back later in a various form.
“It would be interesting to look at these babies right after a month and see if their ability to follow the melodic contours of their language is still there.”
Finest answer:
Answer by Shannon
hmmmm…
Know much better? Leave your own answer in the comments!