Babies develop crying 'accents'

LEIPZIG, Germany, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- French infants cry in a different way than German babies in their first days of life, researchers in Germany and France found.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, the Centre for Pre-language Development and Developmental Disorders at the University Clinic Wurzburg, both in Germany, and the Laboratory of Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris compared recordings of 30 French and 30 German infants 2-5 days old.

The researchers found the French newborns more frequently produced rising crying tones, German babies cried with falling intonation.

In the last trimester of the pregnancy, human fetuses become active listeners, the researchers said.

"The sense of hearing is the first sensory system that develops," Angela Friederici, one of the directors at the Max Planck Institute said in a statement.

"The mother's voice, in particular, is sensed early on, what gets through are primarily the melodies and intonation of the respective language."

The crying patterns of the German infants mostly began loud and high and followed a falling curve while the French infants more often cried with a rising tone -- similar to the intonation of the babies' mother tongue. This early sensitivity to features of intonation may later help the infants learn their mother tongue, the researchers said.

The findings are published in Current Biology.