Since I'm Australian and my hubby is Irish and we both live in the US now, I think our poor baby is just going to sound confused!

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From their very first days, the cries of newborns already bear the mark of the language their parents speak, scientists now find.

French newborns tend to cry with rising melody patterns, slowly increasing in pitch from the beginning to the end, whereas German newborns seem to prefer falling melody patterns, findings that are both consistent with differences between the languages.

This suggests infants begin picking up elements of language in the womb, long before their first babble or coo.

Prenatal exposure

Prenatal exposure to language was known to influence newborns. For instance, past research showed they preferred their mother's voice over those of others.

Still, researchers thought infants did not imitate sounds until much later on. Although three-month-old babies can match vowel sounds that adults make, this skill depends on vocal control just not physically possible much earlier.

However, when scientists recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns when they were three to five days old - 30 born into French-speaking families, 30 into German-speaking ones - their analysis revealed clear differences in the melodies of their cries based on their native tongue.

Imitating Mom

The way babies imitate melody patterns relies just on a command over their voiceboxes they had before birth, instead of the more advanced control of their vocal tracts they need for vowel sounds. As such, they can begin mimicking their mothers "at that early age," said researcher Kathleen Wermke, a medical anthropologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany.

"Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother's behavior in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding," Wermke said.

The researchers conjecture that the development of spoken language is rooted in melody, and that these findings support their idea. "Music and language might have co-evolved for a certain time during evolution and share a primordial form of communication system," Wermke told LiveScience.

The scientists detailed their findings online November 5 in the journal Current Biology.

Source Link here.

Yes, this is very much a reality! I have my degree in second language teaching and child linguistics. Babies respond to their mothers vocal tones in the womb.

This is the reason that people think that children learn second languages so easily, which is actually FALSE! Adults are much better at learning a second language than a child. However, children can learn to pronounce words without an accent at a young age (if they learn certain sounds at a young age, they can reproduce them. After a certain age, children lose that ability). This is why adults have accents - their vocal range cannot reproduce certain non-native sounds, which is why it seems that their second language ability is limited.

If you want your children to learn a second language.. expose them young! We are bilingual (I'm English Canadian, OH is French Canadian), all books and movies will be in both languages!

PS hivechild, your baby will have a US accent, but it's very likely that he/she (he?) will be able to mock mom and dad's accents with precision! LOL!

Great... my baby's going to cry with flat drawn-out vowels and too many "y" sounds! Is there still enough time to drop my Wisconsin accent and try for something more cultured?! lol

Yep, the wee monkey is a he! If he's anything like his daddy, he'll be a good mimic of accents!

I don't want my little man to grow up with a Bawston accent!