When do we start to learn language? For many years, it's been believed that fetuses can hear music and muffled voices of their parents in the womb, but until recently, there was no reliable data.... until now. A recent study released, compared the crys and vocal pattern of those cries, between French and German infants.
Kathleen Wermke, a medical anthropologist at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, confirms that language and simple musical patterns are learned and memorized in utero. Long before babies utters their first real words, inflections and characteristics of their parents' native language can be found in their cries.
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Wermke's team recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy babies that were carried to term, with normal hearing, that were 3-5 days old. Half of the infants had come from French families, and the other half were born to German speaking families, and the cries recorded were spontaneous and not elicited by the researches.
The results were amazing. The infants born to French families had cries the that speech experts dubbed as a "rising melody contour" or a crescendo, while the German infants cried with a "falling melody contour" or decrescendo. Wermke found that the cry patterns were consistent with their respective parents' native languages. She further postulated that the imitation of sounds was not associated with a mature vocal tract which is absent in infants of that age, but was associated with the ability to coordinate sounds and breathing which infants are capable of.
The bottom line is that we now question if language is learned much earlier that previously believed. Maybe there is something to playing loud Mozart music while you're pregnant and singing to your baby in the womb.
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