That’s the title of an article in Current Biology by Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe and Kathleen Wermke. The abstract (paragraph break added):
Human fetuses are able to memorize auditory stimuli from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language. Newborns prefer their mother’s voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech (“motherese”). Their perceptual preference for the surrounding language and their ability to distinguish between prosodically different languages and pitch changes are based on prosodic information, primarily melody. Adult-like processing of pitch intervals allows newborns to appreciate musical melodies and emotional and linguistic prosody.Although prenatal exposure to native-language prosody influences newborns’ perception, the surrounding language affects sound production apparently much later. Here, we analyzed the crying patterns of 30 French and 30 German newborns with respect to their melody and intensity contours. The French group preferentially produced cries with a rising melody contour, whereas the German group preferentially produced falling contours. The data show an influence of the surrounding speech prosody on newborns’ cry melody, possibly via vocal learning based on biological predispositions.
Thanks to my friend Prof. Haym Hirsh for the pointer.
Alan Gunn says:
From accounts of this study elsewhere, it seems to have been downright slovenly. For instance, the conclusions about “crying patterns” was based not on all the babies’ recorded cries, but on particular cries selected by the researchers. If you’re selective enough, you could probably conclude that native new Yorkers talk like Texans.
Probably better than the newspaper accounts in Britain saying that cows had regional accents, though.
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November 17, 2009, 5:55 pmCrunchy Frog says:
What about newborns whose mothers listened to Black Sabbath?
Just askin’.
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November 17, 2009, 6:34 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I remember that when my daughter was born she started screaming immediately. She screamed while they footprinted her, and weighed her, and whatever else, and then they brought her to me. I pulled the blanket back from her face and spoke to her. The screams stopped and she tried to open her eyes. Then they took her away and she started hollering again right away. Minutes old, and she definitely knew my voice.
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November 17, 2009, 8:03 pmLTEC says:
I think that all of these infant studies rely on measuring sucking rates, and are very badly controlled against experimenter bias.
Laura — Maybe she knew your voice. More likely she liked your heartbeat, or your warmth, or being held, or ...
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November 17, 2009, 8:19 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
LTEC, no, because they only laid her next to me briefly and I couldn’t really hold her. She was born a bit early and they just showed her to me and took her away.
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November 17, 2009, 8:27 pm