'Accents' in the womb?

Image via Wikipedia

BBC News ran a story yesterday on babies' ability to pick up certain aspects of their parents' accents in the womb. Before we get carried away by the image of neonates springing out into the world speaking broad Geordie or Brummie, we should look at the study (in press in the journal Current Biology) in a little more detail. The German researchers recorded and analysed the cries of some very young babies—between 2 and 5 days old—born into two language groups, French and German. There were 30 babies in each group. The analysis of the recordings involved examination of the cries' 'melody contours', which makes use of the fact that the cry of a baby follows a distinctive pattern: first rising in pitch, and then falling, in a single arc. 

The results of the analyses showed clear differences between the language groups. The French babies' cries spent longer on the rising part of the arc, and the German cries were skewed towards the falling part. These patterns match up to the particular prosodic patterns of the French and German languages, as demonstrated in other studies (and fully evident to listeners to those spoken languages).

There's nothing particularly new about a finding that foetuses can pick up and learn about auditory information in the womb. In my book, I describe an experiment conducted by Peter Hepper two decades ago, in which babies who had been exposed to the theme tune of the soap Neighbours showed a preference for that tune after they had been born. Plenty of other convincing evidence for foetal learning has been published since the time of Hepper's study. What is striking about this new study is that babies aren't just learning patterns in the womb, but they are also showing an ability to mimic them—which must call for some very sophisticated control over the articulatory system (the system of muscles that allows us to produce speech). Previous findings had shown vocal imitation at 12 weeks, but no earlier. Rather than just making a noise that is constrained by the respiratory (breathing) cycle, newborn babies are actually shaping the sound they make, and doing it in response to sounds they have already heard in the womb. This is particularly true of the French babies, with their 'rising' intonation—not the sort of cry you would hear if babies were simply vocalising their breaths.

In her comments to BBC News, study author Kathleen Wermke speculates that 'crying with an accent' may play a part in attracting the mother's attention and thus forging a bond with her. I was also interested in the comment by Debbie Mills of Bangor University, who questions whether this neonatal capacity for imitation might fall away shortly after birth only to return later in a different form. This 'inverse-U' trajectory of development is commonly observed in the first few months of life, with newborns showing capacities that they then lose, only to recover them again a few months later as different neural systems take responsibility for them.

(Mampe et al., Newborns’ Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language, Current Biology (2009),
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Babies Cry With an Accent, Study Finds (abcnews.go.com)
• Babies Already Have An Accent (scientificamerican.com)
• Newborn Babies May Cry in their Mother Tongues (usnews.com)

Maps in the brain

Image by kerim via Flickr

I'm fascinated by this new post on the Psychology Today blogs, which suggests that children's drawings of the human body might tell us something about how the body is represented in the brain. The idea is that kids' characteristic distortions of the human shape, when they pick up a pencil to draw, reflect the varying importance of different body parts in their perception of the world. Children overemphasise hands, face and mouth because that's where they sense the world most vividly, with the result that their pictures look oddly like the somatosensory maps that neurobiologists have described in the brain. What do readers think?

Life after death?

Maybe.

Some more on memory

I continued this theme yesterday with a post on my Psychology Today blog: you can read the post here. It includes some further details on the research I mentioned in the Guardian article but which didn't make it through to the final piece.

Durham Book Festival

Image via Wikipedia

The Durham Book Festival starts on Friday and runs until 1st November. You can check out all the details at the festival website and also follow progress on Twitter. I'll be appearing at three events on Saturday 24th October. First, I'm doing a thing called 'Little Minds, Big Ideas' at the Gala Studio (1-2pm), exploring how the study of young children's minds can illuminate some deep philosophical puzzles. You can book for this event here. Next I have to leg it over to the Durham Students' Union to take part in the Book Fete, where my theme (4pm) will be 'Anti-Parenting for Dummies'. Finally I'll be hosting the philosopher Julian Baggini whose theme will be 'When in Rome' (5.30-6.30pm).

Hope to see you at some events!

Memories of those who are gone

I've had some really interesting feedback on my article on children's memory for lost family members, published in the Guardian last weekend. My starting point in the piece was the idea that autobiographical memory is fragile and very susceptible to manipulation, particularly in childhood. So parents who want to seed memories of departed grandparents find themselves in fertile territory. I don't know for sure whether it will work or not, long-term, but I hope that my kids will 'remember' their Grandad, through his stories and sayings, almost as vividly as I remember him.

I could have mentioned any number of studies to support the idea of the fallibility of memory. The study I mentioned (call it the 'hot-air balloon study') is a particularly striking demonstration of how our memories can be tricked. The experiment was conducted by Kimberley Wade, now at Warwick University, with colleagues from New Zealand and Canada. As I describe in the piece, adult participants were asked to look at some photographs from their childhood without being told that one of the pictures had been doctored (it depicted a hot-air balloon ride which, it could be verified, had never happened). When interviewed again after about two weeks, around half of the participants 'remembered' the event, and were surprised to hear that it had been invented.

A little while ago I quoted Hilary Mantel on the vividness of early memories, and her conviction that this vividness vouched for their authenticity. Earlier in the same passage, Mantel has this to say:

Sometimes psychologists fake photographs in which a picture of their subject, in his or her childhood, appears in an unfamiliar setting, in places or with people who, in real life they have never seen. The subjects are amazed at first but then—in proportion to their anxiety to please—they oblige by producing a 'memory' to cover the experience that they have never actually had. I don't know what this shows, except that some psychologists have persuasive personalities, that some subjects are imaginative, and that we are all told to trust the evidence of our senses, and we do it: we trust the objective fact of the photograph, not our subjective bewilderment. It's a trick, it isn't science; it's about our present, not about our past.

Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost (2003)

I don't know which research Mantel had in mind, but I'm sure that in the hot-air balloon study participants weren't swayed by persuasive personalities. Actually, Mantel unwittingly hits the nail on the head: memory is about the present, not the past. Memories are constructed to meet the needs of now (which, from an evolutionary point of view, is arguably all the brain is actually interested in).

But Mantel is right that there is something about the hot-air balloon study that lacks ecological validity. To address these concerns, Wade and colleagues followed up their study with another experiment, which I'll call the Slime study. In this experiment, adult participants heard some narratives, provided by their own parents, of events that had happened in the participant's school days. Two of these narratives were genuine, and one other was fake. Specifically, the subjects were 'told' that they had tricked their primary school teacher by putting some green slime in the teacher's desk. (Parents confirmed that this had never actually happened.) The narrative went on to say that the child been caught and subsequently punished. As you would expect, given what we know about the suggestibility of memory, nearly half of the subjects reported some 'memory' for this pseudoevent.

So far, all this does is remind us that memory is easily tricked. But the Slime experiment went further. A separate group of participants followed the same procedure, but these individuals also looked at a class photo taken at the time they were supposed to be recalling. In this group, the rate of false memories jumped from 45% to 78%. In contrast to the hot-air balloon study, the photos themselves were genuine, but they were integrated with other (false) bits of information to create a vivid, and unfounded, 'memory'.

In my own article, I am suggesting that children probably do the same kind of integration of visual images with other kinds of information in creating memories of events that could never actually have happened. The kids know what Grandad Philip looked like, and they can listen to my stories about him. The imaginative storyteller that is memory does the rest.

Thanks to the bloggers

Thank you to the writers of the blogs that have supported the book over the last year or so: One Strangely Lush Mother, Hilery Williams, Sultanas under the carseat, The Briggle Blog, rabbitIng, Kickypants, Alpha Mummy, Mind Hacks, The Cedar Lounge Revolution, clearframe and Morning of Dystopia. And thanks to the readers in the books forums at Mumsnet and The Breast Way for mentioning the book. Sorry if I've missed anyone!

With a new novel pouring out of me, keeping up with Twitter is about all I've been able to manage for the last few weeks, but I promise there'll be something new in the next couple of days.