Babies start to pick up the national nuances of their mother tongue even before birth

Babies start to pick up the national nuances of their mother tongue even before birth, a study has shown.

Scientists have discovered that newborn infants in France and Germany cry with French and German "accents".

The findings suggests that unborn babies are influenced by the sound of their first language penetrating the womb.

It was already known that foetuses can memorise sounds from the outside world by the last trimester, or three months, of pregnancy. They are especially sensitive to the melodic characteristics of both music and human speech.

Newborns prefer their mother's voice over others and react to its emotional content. However, scientists previously thought language traits did not begin to have an influence until much later.

Study leader Dr Kathleen Wermke, from the University of Wurzburg in Germany, said: "The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their foetal life, within the last trimester of gestation. Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants' crying for seeding language development."

Dr Wermke's team recorded and studied the cries of 60 healthy babies aged three to five days born into French and German-speaking families. Their analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the infants' cry melodies that corresponded to their mother tongue.

Earlier studies showed that infants can match vowel sounds made by adult speakers but only from the age of 12 weeks after developing the necessary physical vocal control.

"Imitation of melody contour, in contrast, is merely predicated upon well-coordinated respiratory-laryngeal mechanisms and is not constrained by articulatory immaturity," the researchers wrote in the journal Current Biology.

"Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother's behaviour in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding. Because melody contour may be the only aspect of their mother's speech that newborns are able to imitate, this might explain why we found melody contour imitation at that early age."