Babies Learn Language in the Womb

By Rachel Stockton

Ask any veteran mother, and she will tell you that she “can tell” what her newborn wants by the sound of his or her cries; after just a few weeks, mothers “know” whether the baby is hungry, colicky, or just plain irritable.
So, the following results of a study out of Germany won’t surprise many of them.  Anthropologist Kathleen Wermke of the University of Wurzburg (Germany) led a team that studied the cries of babies to determine if there were differences based on the language spoken at home.

They studied 60 babies; 30 were from German speaking homes, and the remaining thirty were from French speaking families.  They then recorded 2500 cries while their moms got ready to feed them, change their diapers or simply played with them. 

They discovered that 2-5 days after birth, a baby begins to mimic the melodic patterns of its parents; meaning that language actually may begin to develop in the womb.

The intonations and patterns of German and French are significantly different from one another.  The French babies mimicked the high to low pattern of their French speaking parents, and the German tots babbled from low to high.  From three months on, the researchers discovered, the babies began to mimic the vowel sounds of their native languages.

On the flip side, some anthropologists and linguists have asserted that baby cooing and babbling is comprised of a universal set of sounds, regardless of cultural differences.

What they all agree on, however, is that babies cry in an effort to bond with their parents, and of course, to attract undivided attention.