You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
Babies Cry in Their Mother Tongue
A newborn baby's cry may sound the same to the ears of sleep-deprived parents the world over but, say scientists, comparisons of babies a few days old show that the cry of a newborn shares similarities with the language its parents speak. The reason for this is presumably the different intonation patterns in their native languages, which are already perceived in the uterus and are later reproduced.
A It is already known that human foetuses become attentive listeners in the final trimester of pregnancy. "The mother's voice in particular is sensed early on," explains Professor Amelia Finlayson of the Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. "Human foetuses perceive information filtered at around 400 hertz, but they cannot hear the actual words. It is a bit like holding your head under water when someone is talking next to the bath."
B Finlayson's research indicates that newborn babies probably cannot distinguish between the accents of Welsh and Northern Scottish people or between Low German and Upper Bavarian, but they can recognise major differences in the intonation patterns of their respective mother tongues. The Leipzig researchers showed that in an earlier experiment, by means of physiological studies of babies of three to four months of age. For that study, the babies had hoods with electrodes put on their heads, and had recordings of different intonation patterns played to them. The children's brainwaves reacted to the differences even when they were asleep.
C At the same time, Doctor Katya Williams of the University of Würzburg first suggested in her PhD thesis that babies' crying might be a stage in their linguistic development. Said Williams: "It used to be thought that a baby's cry was just a signal of alarm to call its mother. This assumption was corrected when we noticed that the cries are not the same from week to week. What biological purpose would that have? If a fire siren sounded different every day, we would not even recognise it!"
D The question thus presented itself as to whether babies' cries already showed the intonation patterns of their different mother tongues. To study this, the Leipzig brain researchers and the 'screaming researchers' of the University of Würzburg worked in collaboration with their colleagues at the Laboratory of Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, to devise a new experiment. German and French babies were selected for the comparison because the differences in the intonation shapes of these two mother tongues are particularly pronounced. For example, the German word Papa is stressed on the first syllable, while in French it is stressed on the second.
E These three research groups made a comparison of recordings of 60 healthy newborns aged between two and five days old: 30 infants born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families. Whenever the babies were hungry or thirsty or simply wanted their mothers and announced the fact by crying, the researchers were at the ready with their microphones and recorded their complaints. More than 20 hours of recordings of babies' crying were then fed into a computer for the purpose of analysis.
F The amazing result, published in the journal Modern Biology, is that just a few days after birth, babies use the acoustic input they perceive in the uterus to adapt their linguistic production to their target mother tongue. The melody of the German babies' screams usually began loudly and at a high pitch and then followed a downward curve, while the French babies more often screamed with a rising melody contour. Thus, they reproduce precisely the intonation patterns that are characteristic of their respective mother tongues. This proves, says the team of researchers, that babies' cries are attempts to communicate specifically with their mothers. "Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother's behaviour in order to attract her and foster bonding and therefore physical nourishment," they wrote.
G Furthermore, the findings are consistent with the hypothesis that linguistic development does not just begin from the age of nine to ten months, with the first babbling resembling language such as 'mam-mam-mam' or 'ba-ba-ba', but with the very first sounds that babies produce. "We are born to learn language. And that starts right away," says Dr Katya Williams. Dr Williams' colleague, Mr Walter Meade, discovered that this initial sensitivity to the melodic features of language assists infants to subsequently learn their mother tongue. "The melodic patterns practised in crying are building blocks for eventual sound production, such as gurgling and babbling, right up to the first words and sentences," says Meade.
H The results also demonstrated once again how language distinguishes human infants from all other primates. According to Williams, among baby chimpanzees, the 'crying melody' is closely associated with the build-up and reduction of pressure in the lungs, and is not generated by a mental process. "In comparison with the sounds of other primates, the cries of a newborn human baby display a fantastic repertoire of melodic and rhythmic variations," she adds. "Our babies are expert vocalists in comparison with all the other animals. Could that offer some small consolation for nerve-wracked parents?"