Do babies perceive cries as speech?

Speech perception and production are linked in adults. Since infants show sophisticated speech perception abilities before they produce language, the link has been assumed to emerge with development. However, crying is a communication signal that infants produce from birth and their cry melodies are modulated by prenatally heard speech. Cries and speech may thus be developmentally continuous, and the production-perception link may be most evident early in life for cries. We therefore examined whether newborns perceive cries similarly to speech. French neonates exposed to French cries and French speech showed greater neural responses to cries than to speech in the right temporal region. By contrast, Italian adults unfamiliar with French responded more strongly to speech than to cries. Newborns' heightened response to a communicative signal that is less familiar and acoustically less complex, but one they can produce suggests that vocal production and auditory perception may be linked from birth.