Waaaa! Wahhh!

An international team of researchers has found that babies start to learn language in the womb, long before they utter their first coos and babbles.

Sixty healthy newborns took part in the study, 30 of them born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families. Their cries were recorded when they were three to five days old.

French newborns tended to cry with a rising melody contour, while German babies preferred a falling melody shape - patterns which the researchers said match the characteristic differences between the two languages.

The study, published in the "Current Biology" journal, was conducted by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, speech experts from the Wuerzburg University Hospital in Bavaria, and scientists from the Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.

The results show that newborns "are capable of producing different cry melodies" and that they prefer melodies in the pattern of the language they heard in the womb, according to Kathleen Wermke from the University of Wuerzburg.

Learning starts early

Previous studies have shown that human fetuses can memorize sounds from the external world by the last three months of pregnancy and are particularly sensitive to melodies in both music and language.

"Hearing is the first sensory system that develops," said Angela Friederici of the Max Planck Institute. "Especially the mother's voice is recognized early by the baby."

While the fetus cannot hear much through the amniotic fluid that surrounds it in the womb, what does get through is "the melody and intonation of the respective language," she added.

Vocal imitation studies have also shown babies can match vowel sounds spoken by adults, but only from 12 weeks of age.

Wermke's team said its research confirmed that babies' cries are their first proper attempts to communicate specifically with their mothers.

"Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother's behavior in order to attract her and ... foster bonding," researchers 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."

ew/Reuters/AFP

Editor: Sean Sinico