"German newborns produce more cries that fall from a higher to a lower pitch, mimicking the falling intonation of the German language..."

"... while French infants tend to cry with the rising intonation of French.... Newborns whose mothers speak tonal languages, such as Mandarin, tend to produce more complex cry melodies. Swedish newborns, whose native language has what linguists call a 'pitch accent,' produce more sing-songy cries.... Hearing and imitating are fundamental to language development. By the third trimester, a fetus can hear the rhythm and melody of its mother’s voice — known as 'prosody.' Since individual words are muffled by tissue and amniotic fluid, prosody becomes the defining characteristic of language for the fetus. After they are born, young babies mimic many different sounds. But they are especially shaped by the prosody they heard in the womb, which becomes a handy guide to the strange sounds coming from the people around them. Through stress, pauses and other cues, prosody cuts up the stream of sound into words and phrases – that is, into speech."

From "Do Babies Cry in Different Languages?/A pioneering German researcher decodes newborns’ cries. Here’s what they reveal" (NYT).