TELL ME HOW YOU CRY... AND I'LL TELL YOU WHERE YOU ARE FROM!!!

BABIES CRY USING THEIR MOTHER TONGUE'S TONE

Late researchs claim that little babies' tone when crying differs depending on two different factors; the first one is the country where they are born and the second one is what their mother tongue will be, as they are able to listen to their mother's voice from the uterus in the last term of gestation. But how is it possible?

Our accent is an identifying feature of us; that's to say, it shows the place we come from without need to be revealed. An Italian or a German sounds different from a French person when speaking, even if the language used is English, a foreign language in those cases. Have you ever thought the tone could give our origin away before learning how to speak?
Kathleen Wermke, who is a Linguistic Antrophology Teacher at Würzburg University (in Germany), has shown with her recent research that babies cry with their mother's tone when they are just born. According to her investigations, newborns assimilate her mothers' language sound standards and after being born, they reproduce the tone in their cry or weep. The foetus just perceive the rythm and tone of his/her mother tongue and in a natural way to communicate, reproduces it.

A Chinese or Afrikan baby cry is more melodious and harmonious than the cry of a European baby due to the different quality of tones used in Chinese or Afrikan languages, which can be deep or high-pitched and it makes a great difference.

Würzburg researchers performed two lines of work about this topic. First of all they analysed sixty newborns' cries, all of them from monolingual families. Thirty of them were French and thirty of them were German. The crying patterns of those babies coming from French families had a rising melody contour while the German ones performed the opposite pattern; changing from high-pitched sounds to deeper ones.

The second line of work shows the most curious remarks. For example, babies from Camerun's cry last for longer and with a more variable tone in comparison to Germans. In addition, it can be said that scientists observed how babies try to answer their parents by means of the articulation of simmilar-to-vowels sounds... the vowels they hear from adults.

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LANGUAGE ACQUISITION makes relation with the world...

Jonathan (8 month-old baby) is deaf. He was implanted an audition system and the video shows the first time he heard the voice of his mother. His reaction is awesome! What do you think of it?

THE WOLF GIRLS of Midnapore (West Bengal, India)

One of the most famous cases of wild children is, at the same time, an exception. Amala and Kamala were two girls found in Midnapore, in West Bengal (India) in 1920. They were living in a wolves's den when a missioner called J.A.L. Singh was informed by a native who was terrified about the existence of a "kind of gosht" in the forest and it needed an exorcism. When he Singh was trying to solve the mystery, he found two starving girls. the mother wolf defended them as if they were her own wolf cub. The wolf was killed by native people and the two girls, Amala and Kamala (3 and 6 years old) were taken to civilization.
It was supposed they were not real sisters (because of the difference of age), and there is one hypothesis which says that the wolf took them from anywhere at different times.
They didn't feel like humans and didn't allow other humans to touch, caress or just be near them.

They both were absolutely aggresive: they yelped, bit everything and everyone... and seemed to feel no human emotions, as they didn't smile, cry or give out any understandable sound in any human language.

Physically, their bodies, seemed to have suffered a sort of adaptation. for example, they had strong jaws and sharped teeth. The girls had their sight adapted to darkness and there was a frightening bright in their eyes.

They were sent to an orphanage and the other girls who lived there were really frightened of them. They couldn't developed the language or any communicative skills. Only one year after, the little Amala died, and it is said that her "big" sister cried for the first time. Her expression of pain was howling and howling, and the situation was really frustrating for the people who lived with her.

After this chapter, Kamala started a slight progression in communicative skills. She had a little notion of quantity and she learnt about forty words referring to objects of daily life of vital importance. Anyway, whe could never develop a language properly.

In 1929 she died because of the typhoid fever. She was buried with her sister.