Maya had just emerged out of Shanthala’s belly. Slippery and covered with blood and bodily fluids, she lay on the operating table, her umbilical cord still connected to Shanthala. “Hi Sunshine”, I said. Immediately, Maya raised her head (she could hold her head up for a few seconds even immediately after birth) and looked directly at me. I was stunned. The place was noisy, filled with the chatter of the operating staff, clutter of surgical instruments and such. How could her brain cut through all that stuff and focus on that one voice ? How could she know that she was being addressed ?
It is well established now that babies remember what the sounds they heard while still in the womb, especially in their final trimester. For example, it is well researched and accepted that babies prefer their mother’s voice to a stranger’s voice even at birth. Maya may not have understood that she was being spoken to, and with her still immature vision, I may have been too far away for her to really see me, but she most likely recognized my voice. Unlike vision, a baby is born with the ability to listen to quite complex sounds and prefer music or highly intonated sounds, like the way a caregiver speaks to her, in a high-pitched, sing-song voice. However, current research seems to indicate that a baby prefer’s her mother’s voice to a stranger’s, but she cannot distinguish between her father’s voice and that of any strange male’s. Babies also prefer female voices to male voices. Sigh. Talk about gender discrimination beginning at birth.
Last week, I came across a fascinating piece of news. In the current edition of Current Biology, four researchers from Germany and France report that a baby’s cry follows the melody contour of its mother tongue. Studying the cry of 30 French babies and 30 German babies, the researchers say that the cry of French babies has a rising melody contour and that of the German babies has a falling melody contour, a replication of the patterns of the sound of French and German languages. Melody is also known as a tune, such as the arresting tune of the start of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. A melody contour is a drawing that captures the rising and falling of the pitch of a melody. The contour is also visualizable when listening to the sounds. For example, in my mother tongue, Kannada, questions have a rising intonation at the end. Languages such as English and German don’t have as different a melody contour as French and German.
What is astonishing about this new discovery is that the sounds infants hear affects their ability to produce sounds much earlier than has been believed so far. As one of the scientists, Toben Mintz of USC, commented on the finding: “But what is really novel about this study is showing that they can actually produce these patterns in their cries. Crying is not linguistic, yet they seem to be echoing the acoustic patterns that they’ve heard either in utero or very early on, very early exposure, right after birth.”
The paper’s authors speculate that the reason for the baby to do this is because it wants to attrack and bond with the mother. By producing sounds with a similar melody contour to her speech, the baby is saying “I’m yours”.
As Kathleen Wermke, one of the authors of the paper says: “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.”
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