Do Babies Cry in Different Languages?
Do Babies Cry in Different Languages
source/
TESOL English Language Bulletin
In
a sunny hospital room in the German university town of Würzburg one
recent afternoon, Dr. Kathleen Wermke positioned her microphone next to
the tiny red face of a 4-day-old named Joris. As Joris’s mother, Judith
Fricke, began changing his diaper, the baby wriggled, stretched and
opened his eyes.
“Joris,” Dr. Wermke cooed. “Do you want to say something?”
He
didn’t appear to at first. But eventually, Joris let out a few snorts
that built up to a disgruntled cry. This was the moment Dr. Wermke, a
biologist and medical anthropologist who studies babies’ first sounds,
had been waiting for. She made a recording for later analysis in her
lab, Würzburg University Clinic’s Center for Pre-Speech Development and Developmental Disorders. But even without the aid of computerized tools, Dr. Wermke could make out a distinctive pattern in Joris’s wail.
“He really cried in German just now, right?” she said, smiling as she packed up her equipment.
[Do children soak up languages like sponges? A writer finds out.]
In 2009, Dr. Wermke’s and her colleagues made headlines with a study showing that French and German newborns produce distinctly different “cry melodies,”
reflecting the languages they heard in utero: German newborns produce
more cries that fall from a higher to a lower pitch, mimicking the
falling intonation of the German language, while French infants tend to
cry with the rising intonation of French. At this age, babies experiment
with a wide variety of sounds, and can learn any language. But they are
already influenced by their mother tongue.
Today,
Dr. Wermke’s lab houses an archive of around a half-million recordings
of babies from as far afield as Cameroon and China, where a team of
graduate students armed with recording equipment paced the corridors of a
Beijing hospital around the clock. (Babies are never made to cry for
the sake of a recording, so the students dove into a room whenever they
heard a promising specimen).
Quantitative
acoustic analysis of these recordings has produced further insights
into the factors that shape a baby’s first sounds. Newborns whose
mothers speak tonal languages, such as Mandarin, tend to produce more complex cry melodies. Swedish newborns, whose native language has what linguists call a “pitch accent,” produce more sing-songy cries.
These
studies underpin the lab’s broader effort to map the typical
development of a baby’s cries, as well as vocalizations like cooing and
babbling. Knowing what typical development looks like, and what factors
can influence it, helps doctors address potential problems early on.
Dr.
Wermke’s team already routinely works with doctors at the Würzburg
University Clinic to support babies with hearing difficulties, recording
babies before and after they receive hearing aids or surgery. These
recordings can help doctors and parents understand how hearing problems
are affecting the babies’ ability to imitate and experiment with
language — long before this would otherwise become obvious — and how
they are progressing after treatment.
Hearing
and imitating are fundamental to language development. By the third
trimester, a fetus can hear the rhythm and melody of its mother’s voice —
known as “prosody.” Since individual words are muffled by tissue and
amniotic fluid, prosody becomes the defining characteristic of language
for the fetus. After they are born, young babies mimic many different
sounds. But they are especially shaped by the prosody they heard in the
womb, which becomes a handy guide to the strange sounds coming from the
people around them. Through stress, pauses and other cues, prosody cuts
up the stream of sound into words and phrases – that is, into speech.
Image
“Imagine you’re thrown into a new language environment, which is what happens with the newborn,” said Judit Gervain, a senior research scientist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris
who studies early speech perception. “There’s just so much going on:
There are all the words, there’s all the meaning, all the grammar, all
the sounds, all of it. You can’t do it all, it’s just too much. One way
prosody helps is it gives them nice little chunks that are the right
size.”
In English, for example, a stressed syllable is often a cue for the start of a word, as in: English language. In French, a lengthened syllable signals the end of a sentence, as in: “Bonjour Madame!” Long before they can speak, babies begin to recognize patterns like these.
“A lot has to happen before that first word is produced,” said Janet Werker, a developmental psychologist at the University of British Columbia who studies early language acquisition.
Babies
also use prosody to distinguish between languages, explained Krista
Byers-Heinlein, a developmental psychologist at Concordia University in
Montreal who studies bilingualism. “No one has told them ahead of time,
watch out, there’s going to be two languages!” she said. And yet, she
said, “Children exposed to two languages from the very beginning are
perfectly capable of acquiring those two languages at the same time.”
One of the ways they do this is through prosody. They may not yet grasp
the concept of language, but they can hear that some sounds follow one
rhythm, and others another.
Image
The Würzburg team has shown that newborns don’t just hear prosody. They also imitate it.
“Babies
come to language through musical elements, through hearing the
intonation of their mother tongue,” Dr. Wermke explained as we sat
together in her lab, a cluster of bright offices and a recording studio.
Around us, graduate students wearing headphones listened to recordings
of baby sounds. One area of the lab was kitted out with a play mat and
toys. A giant model of a human ear sat on a shelf.
Dr.
Wermke played her recording of baby Joris on a computer, using
specialized software that mapped the fluctuating pitch and intensity of
his cries. Joris took a breath and let out a gently falling sound as he
exhaled, as if his voice were gliding down a long slope: Waah! He took a breath and repeated the sound: Waah! Together, these sounds formed the chain so typical of newborn cries: Waah! Waah! Waah!
On the screen, each “Waah!” appeared as a little arc with one long, sloping side.
“You can see that he has this falling pattern,” Dr. Wermke said, pointing at the long slope. “So that’s already German.”
In
a healthy newborn, the shape and sequence of these individual arcs
evolve rapidly. Within the next days and weeks, Joris is expected to
combine the arcs, using them as building blocks for his ever-closer
imitation of the sounds he hears from the adults around him: Waahwaah! Waahwaahwaah!
Eventually,
he will produce his first consonants. For example, pressing his lips
together will naturally result in an “m” sound. Waah-waah will
become Ma-ma — “Mama” being the German word for “mother,” as in many
other languages, probably because it is so easy to say.
In some babies, however, this process stalls.
Image
Wermke
played me a recording of a cooing 2-month old with profound hearing
loss. At this age, he should be producing varied, gliding melodies,
visible on the screen as multiple arcs during each exhale. Instead, the
screen shows a series of individual bumps, mixed up with his breathing.
“It
sounds cute, and as a parent, you wouldn’t notice anything,” Dr. Wermke
said. “But when you analyze it, you can see the differences.”
One
of the lab’s current projects with the department of otolaryngology at
the Würzburg University Clinic aims to deepen our understanding of how
hearing difficulties affect crying and cooing. Wermke’s team are
sampling 150 newborns. For half of them, a hearing test signaled
potential problems. The other half, including Joris, passed the test and
form a control group. They are recorded in their first week of life,
and again at 2.5 months, to see whether and how their cries and coos
have evolved.
Pinpointing problems at this
early stage can help put a baby’s development back on track, especially
if the parents articulate words carefully to show how each sound is
formed.
We listen to another baby. She is
almost 10 months old, and has just had a cochlear implant, which turns
sound into electric signals and sends them to the cochlear nerve.
Implanting it is a big decision, as the operation irreversibly destroys
any remaining hearing.
In this baby’s first
recording after the operation, she emits a series of high-pitched,
metallic calls, imitating the beeps of her newly activated device: ‘Hooo! Hooo!’
Image
Soon, however, she grows used to it. What happens next is astonishing.
In
just over a month, the baby undergoes a fast-forward version of the
typical developmental path. She races from single arcs to multiple arcs
to syllables with consonants. The next stage will be words.
“They catch up pretty fast,” Dr. Wermke said of post-implant babies.
The
2-month-old with hearing problems also makes a leap. Nine days after
receiving a hearing aid, his irregular, choked cries have given way to
confident experiments with vowel sounds.
It’s
not just babies with hearing devices who can be tracked this way. Two of
Dr. Wermke’s Ph.D. students, Pauline Hammerstädt and Jasmin Mack,
showed me a tiny plastic plate that’s used to cover the roof of the
mouths of newborns with a cleft palate. They analyze recordings of
babies with and without the inserted plate from birth to 180 days, to
investigate how this affects their speech development. Such information
can help doctors decide on the best treatment plan.
For
ordinary parents wanting to give their child the best start, Dr.
Wermke’s advice is simple: “They just need to listen, spend time with
their babies, sing to them, cuddle them.” While looking after her
grandchildren, Dr. Wermke also experimented with another sound that
proved very soothing: howling.
Image
She
demonstrated this to me in her office, puckering her lips and filling
the room with an undulating, wolf-like sound. I tried to copy her, she
offered tips for improvement, and for a while we sat there, howling at
each other. Later, I saw her howl at two babies and newborn Joris, none
of whom she’d met before. One of the babies laughed with delight and
seemed absolutely transfixed. The other stopped crying and relaxed.
Newborn Joris turned his head to peer at the howling scientist, let out a
deep sigh and fell asleep.
All parents, Dr.
Wermke said, have an innate ability to understand and respond to their
babies. Indeed, it was mothers who supported her research from the
beginning, even as other scientists were skeptical. In the 1980s, when
Dr. Wermke first began recording babies’ sounds, many researchers viewed
crying as a mere biological alarm signal, worth investigating only in
the context of problems such as colic. But mothers never doubted that
their tiny babies were worth studying. As Judith Fricke, little Joris’s
mother, said, “I think you’d recognize the sound of your own child among
a hundred others. You develop an ear for that.”
And
the howl? After returning from my trip, I tried it out on my 3-week-old
nephew. My version was not as melodious as Dr. Wermke’s, but to my
delight, it sort of worked. He snuggled against my shoulder and stopped
crying – at least for a little while
Sophie Hardach ( a journalist and author living in London) ..
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