Is a baby’s cry automatic or intentional?
A newborn baby expresses 5 needs with 5 unintentional words.
Priscilla Dunstan discovered, in 1998, that a newborn, in the first 3 months after birth, says 5 words. Each word is an involuntary vocal response to one of 5 physical conditions: the need to eat, to sleep, to burp, to move lower intestinal gas, and to remove discomfort.
According to Dunstan, infants universally say these 5 “words” as a pre-cry, before the urgent crying starts when the infant’s needs are not met. The same words are heard across different cultures. After crying starts, the reflex-action word identifying the need will be repeated, but will be more difficult to hear.
For an explanation of these universal words, and the physical basis from which the vocal reflex actions are derived, Click here.
A baby’s cry has the intentional melody of the baby’s native language.
Although a cry will automatically follow a pre-cry “word” if the infant’s need is not met, the cry has been found to contain the inflection melody of the baby’s native language. That melody has been learned, and is believed to be an effort to communicate.
Telling the difference between a German and French speaker isn’t difficult. But you may be more surprised to know that you could have a good stab at distinguishing between German and French babies based on their cries. The bawls of French newborns tend to have a rising melody, with higher frequencies becoming more prominent as the cry progresses. German newborns tend to cry with a falling melody.
These differences are apparent just three days out of the womb. This suggests that they pick up elements of their parents’ language before they’re even born, and certainly before they start to babble themselves.
Birgit Mampe from the University of Wurzburg analysed the cries of 30 French newborns and 30 German ones, all born to monolingual families. She found that the average German cry reaches its maximum pitch and intensity at around 0.45 seconds, while French cries do so later, at around 0.6 seconds.
Source: Newborns cries match native language inflection.
Click next page to hear examples of a French and a German baby’s melodic cry, as well as a TED talk which notes that a bird’s song (think Superb Fairy-wren, for example) is considered different if sung at a different pitch, though the pattern may be a single pattern.
