|
|
Achtung baby! German babies say ‘wäh’, French say ‘ouain’
It can be easy to “catch” an accent if you spend enough time in a
foreign country - now it seems fetuses start grappling with the
specifics of their mother tongue even when cocooned inside the womb.
That’s the conclusion of a new study in Current Biology that compared the cries of 30 healthy French and 30 German newborns aged just two to five days old.
We
already knew that from around 32 weeks, fetuses can learn that an
arbitrary stimulus is a signal that something is about to happen, and
that language acquisition begins prenatally: a newborn will suck more vigorously if it hears its native language rather than a foreign one.
In the latest study,
Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany and colleagues
claim that the womb may also be where we learn to produce our first
sounds. Wermke’s team found that French newborns
produced “rising” or low to high, contours of sound, whereas German
newborns preferentially produced “falling”, or high to low, contours.
The researchers write that these are “consistent with the intonation
patterns observed in both of these languages”, and conclude that these
differences are in place so soon after birth that they must have been
learned prenatally.
If we accept from a sample of 60 babies that they all will be born
gurgling in a ready-made accent, we might like to ponder evolutionary
reasons. “Newborns are highly
motivated to imitate their mother’s behaviour in order to attract her
and hence to foster bonding,” Wermke told the BBC.
That remains to be seen. Disentangling the role of environment and genes is the
aim of much psycholinguistic research:
how babies go from gurgling at birth to fluent speech by the age of
three is still hotly debated.
