Babies cry in different languages. Free Technical Library News

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Babies scream in different languages

02.09.2016

It seems to us that babies cry the same way everywhere, and it’s just stupid to talk about any language differences here - newborns can’t even speak. However, in fact, there are differences between them, at least when comparing children from China, Germany and Cameroon.

It's all about the difference between tone and non-tone languages. As you know, in many languages the meaning of a word depends on the sound pitch at which it is pronounced; pitch variations of syllables and words can completely change the meaning of what we are talking about. One example is Mandarin Chinese, including its variety Putonghua, which is an official language in China, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Northern Chinese has four tones. A more complex case is Lamnso, the language of the Nso people living in Northern Cameroon. Nso communicate with each other already on eight tones, and the meaning of each tone is determined by its variations during the pronunciation of a particular word.

When researchers from the University of Würzburg, the University of Osnabrück and Beijing Normal University compared the sounds made by infants whose mothers spoke German, Mandarin and LamNso, it turned out that the cry of "tonal" children was different from the cries of "non-tonal". Thus, in the cries of NSO infants, the interval between the highest and lowest tone was wider, and the children easily and quickly moved from height to height compared to newborns whose mothers spoke German. In general, the cries of the Cameroonians partly resembled singing.

The same results were obtained when comparing babies from Germanic mothers with babies whose mothers spoke Chinese, only here the differences were not so noticeable - probably because the Chinese language is still "less toned" than Lamnso.

The researchers analyzed the cries of children who were only a day old. New data support the hypothesis that language acquisition by a child occurs already in the later stages of pregnancy: according to the authors of the work, the baby hears the mother’s speech while still in her womb, and already at this time his brain absorbs some pronunciation rules.

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