Verified on 04/19/2024 by Alexane Flament, Editor
It’s not always easy to know what a baby’s crying means. However, it is the only way that newborns have to make themselves understood.
Hunger, thirst, sleep, need for physical contact… Could scientists teach us to decode babies’ cries?
A cry, a cause?
With training and practice, parents seem to be able to determine what their child’s crying means. So the cause could vary: hunger, discomfort, isolation…
Interest in this question seems universal, but scientific studies are still too rare to support parents’ knowledge.
This was without taking into account two research teams from Jean Monnet University in Saint-Étienne, Inserm and the CNRS, who took up the challenge of answering this question.
The acoustic characteristics of the cry would be correlated with a level of distress in which the child finds himself, pushing the adult to react.
A way of crying specific to each baby
To carry out this study, researchers analyzed nearly 40,000 cries from twenty-four babies, girls and boys, recorded during the first four months of their lives. They then looked for a link between the crying and the event that had triggered it.
Then, they carried out experiments where listeners listened to part of the recorded crying and had to try to identify the cause.
Result : the crying of boys and girls seems similar.
However, every baby cries in their own way. But contrary to popular belief, scientists have concluded that babies do not cry differently, depending on a cause.
On the contrary, they proved “that babies’ cries linked to hunger, isolation or discomfort did not present distinct characteristics” indicates INSERM.
The sample of listeners was unable to identify the cause of the crying produced by the children.
“L’informationn salient feature of crying is that of the baby’s level of distress which is coded by a set of traits such as acoustic roughness. This information is obviously essential since it provides information on the degree of urgency to react to crying”explains Nicolas Mathevon, head of this study.
Health journalist
April 19, 2024, at 4:10 p.m.
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