Nov 10, 2009 / 22:08 pm
Researchers in brain science and language development have found that infants in the first days of their life cry in different ways depending on their parents’ language.
Scientists compared recordings of 30 French and 30 German infants aged between two and five days old, the Max Planck Society reports. They found that French newborns more frequently cried with a rising tone, while the German infants cried with a falling intonation.
This phenomenon, researchers said, is presumably rooted in the different patterns in the two languages which are perceived in the womb and later reproduced.
“In French, a lot of words have stress at the end, so that the intonation rises, while in German, it is mostly the opposite,” explained Angela Friederici, one of the Directors at the Max Planck Institute.