Human fetuses are able to memorize auditory stimuli from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language. Newborns prefer their mother's voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech ("motherese"). Their perceptual preference for the surrounding language and their ability to distinguish between prosodically different languages and pitch changes are based on prosodic information, primarily melody. Adult-like processing of pitch intervals allows newborns to appreciate musical melodies and emotional and linguistic prosody. Although prenatal exposure to native-language prosody influences newborns' perception, the surrounding language affects sound production apparently much later. Here, we analyzed the crying patterns of 30 French and 30 German newborns with respect to their melody and intensity contours. The French group preferentially produced cries with a rising melody contour, whereas the German group preferentially produced falling contours. The data show an influence of the surrounding speech prosody on newborns' cry melody, possibly via vocal learning based on biological predispositions.

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Crying is the earliest sound production of human infants on their long way toward language. Here, we argue that infants’ early crying contains melodic constituents for both musical and prosodic structures. This view is based on our findings that cry melodies become increasingly complex during the first months of life and, that complex cry melodies are composed of shape-specific melody arcs. We found that cry melodies contain frequency ratios that show a certain preference of musical intervals. We also observed that young infants are capable of uttering shape-similar melody arcs at different frequency levels, that means they have an aptitude for frequency transposition from birth on. Moreover, we observed that the production of phonatory breaks within single expiratory sounds generates rhythmical elements and points to a flexible time organization. Our data support the view that in crying elementary constituents of both musicality and language faculty are unfolding. The results may elucidate the relation between emotionally charged sounds and music respectively language and suggest direction for further research.