From “Cognition and Culture”:http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=550:can-you-tell-the-language-of-the-mother-from-the-baby-cry-&catid=52:nicolas-claidieres-blog&Itemid=34, a blog that should surely have been on my reading list a long time ago:
bq. A recently published article by Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe and Kathleen Wermke entitled “Newborns’ Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language”:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VRT-4XMC7T8-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1110800012&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=b7529d811836481b452ebcad6bb14c6e shows evidence that newborns’ cry melody is influenced by the native language of their mother. The authors analysed the melody contours of 1254 cries (selected from 2500 recordings) from 30 French and 30 German monolingual families. They normalized each cry duration and measured the time at which the maximum pitch was reached and the time at which the maximum intensity was reached. Babies from both German and French group produced various cries with very different melodies, but in mean there was a significant difference between the melody of German baby cries and of French baby cries. We can therefore conclude that, on average, the baby cries’ melodies are closer to the melody of their mother’s tongue than to that other tongues (but see “Mark Liberman Language Log post”:http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1869 for some methodological issues).
The blog provides a tentative evolutionary explanation of the difference and two recordings of baby cries – you can try to guess which is French, and which is German. Bonus marks for anyone who can identify the allusion in the title without Googling it.