This is interesting. Newborns respond preferentially to stories in the ‘mother tongue’ before they’ve had a chance to hear much talking through air conduction.
Were they picking up intonations and prosody through the liquids in the womb? Or is the familiarity imparted through epigenes?
The former possibility could be checked by using different languages with similar prosody.
Arabic and English are hugely different in grammar and vocabulary, but sound the same in terms of rhythm and tone.
Czech would be especially interesting. It shares prosody with Hungarian, which is otherwise unrelated. Toneless, not much stress, big changes in length of vowels. Czech is nearly identical to Russian in grammar and vocabulary, but Russian has more music and stress variation and much less length variation.
Polistra's Mill 