"Long before it's in the papers" November 06, 2009 RETURN TO THE WORLD SCIENCE HOME PAGE 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.”