Language and Identity

Comparisons of babies a few days old show that even newborns cry in their mother tongue. The reason for this is presumably the different intonation patterns in the two languages, which are already perceived in the uterus and are later reproduced.

A comparison was made of recordings of 30 French and 30 German infants between two and five days old. Whenever the babies were hungry or thirsty or simply wanted their mothers and announced the fact by crying, the researchers were at the ready with their microphones and recorded their complaints. More than 20 hours of recordings of babies’ crying were then evaluated using a computer program.

French or German? Low German or Upper Bavarian?

It was already known that human foetuses become attentive listeners in the last trimester of pregnancy. “The mother’s voice in particular is sensed early on,” explains Professor Angela D. Friederici of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. “Human foetuses perceive information filtered at around 400 hertz, but they cannot hear the actual words. It is a bit like holding your head under water when someone is talking next to the bath.”

So the tots probably cannot recognise differences between Welsh and Northern Scottish or between Low German and Upper Bavarian accents, but they can recognise major differences in the intonation patterns of their respective mother tongues. The Leipzig researchers showed that back in 2007 by means of physiological studies of the brains of babies three to four months of age. For the study, the tots had hoods with electrons put on their heads and had recordings of different intonation patterns played to them. The children’s brainwaves reacted to the differences even when they were asleep.

Language begins with the first cry

At the same time, Professor Kathleen Wermke demonstrated in her habilitation thesis that babies’ crying is a first step in their linguistic development. Said Wermke: “It used to be thought that a baby’s cry was just an alarm signal to call its mother. This assumption was corrected when we noticed that the cries change from week to week. What biological purpose would that have? If a fire siren sounded different every day, we would not even recognise it!”

The question thus presented itself as to whether babies’ cries already showed the intonation patterns of their different mother tongues. To study it, the Leipzig brain researchers and the “screaming researchers” of the Centre for Pre-language Development and Developmental Disorders at the University of Würzburg worked hand in hand with their colleagues at the Laboratory of Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. German and French babies were selected for the comparison because the differences in the intonation of the two mother tongues, i.e. their melody and rhythm, are particularly pronounced. For example, the German word “Pápa” is “Papá” in French.

The amazing result is that babies use the acoustic input they perceive in the uterus just a few days after birth to adapt their linguistic production to their target mother tongue. The melody of the German babies’ screams usually began loudly and at a high pitch and then followed a downward curve, while the French babies more often screamed a rising melody. Thus, they reproduce precisely the intonation patterns that are typical of their respective mother tongues.

“Expert vocalists in comparison with all the other animals”

The findings support the theory that linguistic development does not, as previously assumed, only begin at the age of nine to ten months with the first babbling resembling language such as “mam-mam-mam” or “ba-ba-ba”, but with the first sounds. “We are born to learn language. And that starts right away,” says Professor Kathleen Wermke of the Centre for Pre-Language Development and Developmental Disorders at the University of Würzburg. Together with her colleague Werner Mende of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, she discovered that this early sensitivity to the melodic features of language helps infants learn their mother tongue later on. “The melodic patterns practised in crying are building blocks for subsequent sound production, such as gurgling and babbling, right up to the first words and sentences,” says Wermke.

The results also demonstrated once again how language distinguishes human infants from all other primates. Among baby chimpanzees, the “crying melody” is closely associated with the build-up and reduction of breath pressure and is not generated by the brain. “In comparison with the sounds of other primates, the cries of a new-born human baby display a fantastic repertoire of melodic and rhythmic variations,” says Wermke. “Our babies are expert vocalists in comparison with all the other animals.” Could that offer some small consolation for nerve-wracked parents?