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.
