When The Science Hits The Fan - Baby Words

Harper is adding to her vocabulary every day. It's really fun for me to watch this stage of her development. Just yesterday as we were leaving baby school, I said "see you tomorrow" to her teacher and Harper waved and said "tomorrow"! Well actually she said "morrow", but I knew what she meant - and so did she.

This morning, one of the news stories on my homepage was about a study that demonstrated that newborn babies cry in their native language. Researchers recorded the cries of healthy French and German newborns (3-5 days old) and compared them. They found that the French babies tend to cry with rising melody patterns, slowly increasing in pitch from the beginning to the end. In contrast, the cries of the German babies followed falling melody patterns. These differences are consistent with differences between the French and German languages. This study suggests that babies in the womb are conditioned to the language that they hear most often. It also demonstrates that newborns have more control over their vocal cords than originally thought.