Posted on 12/04/2009 6:46:16 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Newborn babies start learning language in the womb -- and are born with what you might call accents, a new study of crying babies says. That fetuses hear and become accustomed to language is nothing new. Several studies have shown that, when exposed to different languages shortly after birth, a baby will typically indicate a preference for the language closest to the one he or she would've heard during gestation... For the new study, a team led by Kathleen Wermke at the Center for Prespeech Development and Developmental Disorders at Würzburg University in Germany studied the cry "melodies" of 60 healthy newborns -- 30 French and 30 German... The melodies of the newborn babies' cries followed the same intonations of the languages the babies had heard in the womb. The French babies' cries, for example, tended to end on a rising note... "Further analysis of human infants' crying and other utterances," she said, "may contribute to resolving the enigma as to how language may have emerged in early [human ancestors]."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
Newborn babies, such as this boy seen in a file photo, are born with accent-like intonationsâcrying in roughly the "melodies" of their mother tongues -- according to a November 2009 study. [Photograph by Jason Edwards, NGS]
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He looks like he is speaking German...
Ich bin ein Bawlinner
How can an “unviable tissue mass” learn language? /sarc (of course)
:o)
You win the prize!
How much ‘Grant’ money did this study cost?
Some of it came from Lee.
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