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Many studies have already revealed that children can learn foreign languages while they are still very young yet a new study finds that babies already start learning languages from their mothers’ wombs.

A new study published in Current Biology has found that newborns already bear the mark of the language that their parents speak. The research results suggest that infants begin picking up what would be their first language from the womb, long before they make their first sound.

Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany has said that “The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation. Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants’ crying for seeding language development.”

Earlier studies have showed that human fetuses are able to memorize sounds from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy with a specific sensitivity to melody contour in both language and music. Newborn babies prefer the voices of their mothers over other voices and they perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed through intonation contours in maternal speech. The perceptual preference of newborns for the surrounding language and their ability to differentiate between different languages and pitch changes are based mainly on melody.

It was known that prenatal exposure to native language influences newborn’s perception, scientists has thought that the surrounding language affected sound production much later. Now with the new study, what was thought to be is not so.

Kathleen Wermke’s research team recorded and analyzed the cries of sixty healthy newborn babies when they were three to five days old. Thirty of the babies are born into French-speaking families while the remaining thirty are born into German speaking families. The analysis of the babies’ cries revealed clear differences in the shape of the newborns’ cry melodies based on their native tongue.

The analysis shows that French newborn babies tend to cry with a rising melody contour while the German newborns prefer a falling melody contour in their crying. Wermke said that the crying patterns are consistent with characteristic differences between the French and German languages.

The researchers say new research data show an extremely early impact of native language since earlier studies of vocal limitation had shown that infants can match vowel sounds presented to them by adult speakers but not only from twelve weeks onwards. That language skill depends on the vocal control that just isn’t physically possible much earlier.

The researchers said that “Imitation of melody contour, in contrast, is merely predicated upon well-coordinated respiratory-laryngeal mechanisms and is not constrained by articulatory immaturity. Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behavior in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding. 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.”

This new discovery may help produce more than just and understanding of how language develops. Wermke said, “Further analysis of human infants’ crying and other utterances may contribute to resolving the enigma as to how language may have emerged in early human ancestors.”

The researchers include Kathleen Wermke and Birgit Mampe of the University of Wurzburg, Wurzburg, Germany; Angela D. Friederici of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; and Anne Christophe of Ecole Normale Superieure/CNRS, Paris, France.

Would you agree or disagree that babies start learning languages from their mothers’ wombs? Share your thoughts with us.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 9:31 am and is filed under Language and Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.