A Cry in the Womb

Babies start processing speech patterns in the womb and this is reflected in a newborn’s cry

Arjun’s son Abhimanyu learnt the art of penetrating the war formation Chakravyuh while still in his mother Subhadra’s womb. Krishna, her brother, finding she had fallen asleep, stopped his instructions midway and Abhimanyu was never able to learn how to fight his way out of the formation. As a young man, he came to the aide of his uncles during the Mahabharata war by breaking open the Kaurava encirclement, but it closed in on him and he died fighting. Improbable as the myth seems, learning in the womb may not be such an outlandish idea after all.

It seems newborn babies cry out the language they were most exposed to in the womb. The new study by Kathleen Wermke and her team at Würzburg University in Germany studied the cry ‘melodies’ of 60 newborns, 30 French and 30 German. The two languages differ significantly in their intonation. French speakers raise their pitch towards the end of a word or a sentence; Germans do quite the opposite. It turns out that babies just a few days old follow the same pattern in their crying—French babies ending their cries on a rising note and German babies on a falling note. Wermke says, “The dramatic finding was that the French prefer to produce those having their pitch maximum at the end, while the Germans did not. I think we should be more aware that crying is a language itself and the baby is really trying to communicate with us by its first sounds already.” Earlier studies had shown that babies can imitate vowel sounds when they were about three months old, but clearly they seem to be able to imitate and retain speech patterns much earlier. In their paper the scientists say, ‘Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behaviour 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.’

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