A newborn child crying. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Think newborns just eat, sleep and wail the same way across the world? That’s not so, according to a new study which found that babies cry with an accent within the first week of life
By recording cries of 60 babies born to French or German parents, researchers discovered that babies cry with the same “prosody” or melody used in their native language by the second day of life.
French newborns in the study ended their cries with a lilt at the end typically heard in French. German babies, however, started their cries intensely and dropped off at the end — much like the emphasis their German parents put in a sentence, according to a study published Thursday in Current Biology.
Experts in child development say the most exciting part of this discovery is not that infants recognize the melody of their language, but that the newborns may have the ability to use what they heard in the womb to then control their cries.
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