A mother’s language and voice modulation affects how her newborn infant cries
Some languages are tonal. This means the pitch of the speaker’s voice affects the meaning of the words; the same sound can mean something entirely different depending upon the pitch. Mandarin Chinese, spoken by over a billion people, is such a language. There are four pitches that must be mastered to speak Mandarin. I have a friend who spent three years in China and really struggled with this. I don’t recall the details, but as I recall she told me, as one example, the word for “fish” means something entirely different when uttered in a different pitch. There is a language spoken in Cameroon that is even more complicated, sound-wise. This language has eight different pitches that affect word meaning, and there are further modulations in pitch that complicate things even more.
The particular study cited above was a collaboration between investigators in China and Germany. German is not a tonal language, of course. The investigators recorded the vocalizations of 102 newborn infants, examining in particular pitch, fluctuation, and range. The results, in the words of the lead author, were clear:
The crying of neonates whose mothers speak a tonal language is characterized by a significantly higher melodic variation as compared to – for example – German neonates.
It’s even more interesting when you consider that these are newborns. They’ve only been out of the womb a couple of days. So the clear implication is that they heard their mothers speaking while still in utero and acquired patterns of vocalization that they begin to use immediately after they were born. That’s quite amazing, I think. It has implications even for those mothers who don’t speak tonal languages: that is, your baby can hear what you’re saying, especially during the last trimester of pregnancy, so be sensitive of your tone. So maybe if you are angry and yell a lot your infant may actually be impacted by that, and not in a good way. Something to think about.
Sachin on 