FCM PB Medicina 2010/1

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"Crying baby" and "music" don't usually go together, but interesting science starts with questions no one else thought to ask—in this case, what are the musical contours of a newborn's cry? There had already been research on what sounds a fetus can hear in the womb and what effect that has right after birth, with several research teams finding that newborns prefer their mothers' voices over those of other people.

Now a team of scientists has gone a step further: they have found that newborns cry in their native language. They recorded 2,500 cries of newborn babies, 30 French and 30 German, between 2 and 5 days old. The idea was to extend the existing findings about what sounds babies can perceive—their native language, their mother's voice—to test what sounds they can create. Once the researchers had their recordings, they set to work analyzing the cries' melodic qualities.

Little babies produce wails that vary in pitch. Since most of us have heard only the cries of babies whose parents speak our language, we tend not to think twice about the pattern of pitch changes. But that is not what the scientists found. French babies tended to cry "with a rising melody contour". The pitch changed from low to high, rising toward the end of words as well as phrases within a sentence. In contrast, the German babies' cries had falling melodic contours. The pitch fell from high to low, which is consistent with the sound of German's falling melody contour, from the accented high-pitch syllable at the start of a phrase or word to the lower pitch at the end of a phrase. There is, in short, "a tendency for infants to utter melody contours similar to those perceived prenatally," write the scientists.

"The impressive finding of this study is that not only are [newborns] capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester," said the research leader. "Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants' crying for seeding language development."

It had been thought that babies' cries are constrained by their breathing patterns and respiratory apparatus, in which case a crying baby would sound like a crying baby no matter what the culture, since babies are anatomically identical. "The prevailing opinion used to be that newborns could not actively influence their production of sound," says researcher. This study refutes that claim: since babies cry in different languages, they must have some control over what they sound like rather than being constrained by the acoustical properties of their lungs, throat, mouth, and larynx.

The idea of the study wasn't to make the sound of a screaming baby more interesting to listeners but to explore how babies acquire speech. That acquisition, it is now clear, begins months before birth, probably in the third trimester. Until this study, scientists thought that babies became capable of vocal imitation no earlier than 12 weeks of age. That's when infants listening to an adult speaker producing vowels can parrot the sound. But that's the beginning of true speech.

Source: Newsweek (Adapted from: http://www.newsweek.com/id/221357, November/2009)