Do Infants Cry in their Native Language?

Usually, linguists wait until people start speaking before asking them obvious questions about how they learned to talk. That was not going to stop Birgit Mampe of the University of Würzburg whose paper "Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language" was published last month in the journal Current Biology. The article, which recently made a splash in the major media pool (including the BBC and NPR), suggests that you should never let a placenta get in the way of your education....

Having not yet shelled out the 30-bucks for the full article, I can only report what the abstract (link) tells us: having shown that (1) fetuses can memorize melodies from the outside world during the last three months in the womb and (2) newborns are sensitive to a person's tone of voice (or "prosody"), Mampe and her fellow researchers analyzed the melody and intensity contours of newborns' cries in France and Germany and claim that they match the melody of French and German.

For a dissenting view, however, check out this post on John Well's phonetic blog and this excellent critique from Language Log.  Both of which suggest that these results should be taken with a small salt mine.  What is less controversial is the idea that infants start to learn the broadest aspects of their vocal behavior very early on.  If this is true, it means that we could learn the prosodic aspect of syntax (the 'rhythm' of a language) first.

Which leads me to pondering... I had always thought of intonation as being something that was added on top of a sentence.  First we figure out what we're going to say, then how we're going to say it.  What if it was the other way around?  The foundation of our speech could be a set of tonal templates, like musical scores that correspond to basic, learned need-response patterns: statement, command, question, etc.

The act of speaking might start not with a notion, but an emotion.  We could build sentences not by transforming logical equations, but by elaborating these basic chords like jazz musicians improvising on the fly. Less Noam Chomsky, more Charlie Parker.

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The preceding was an unpaid and unsolicited rant by Schendo, and does not represent the views of anyone (including himself).  Most of it is wild speculation, the rest is factually incorrect and a small percentage might be illegal to read in Singapore, Utah and some Persian Gulf Emirates.