In an ambitious cross-cultural study, researchers have found that adults around the world talk and sing to babies in similar ways.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
We’ve all seen it, we’ve all been scared of it, and we’ve all done it ourselves: talk to a baby like it’s, you know, a baby.
You say “Oooh, hellooooo baby!” », your singing voice like a store clerk who raves in front of a customer. The baby is completely taken aback by your unintelligible cooing and gaga smile, but “baby so cute!” “.
Researchers recently determined that this sing-along childish language — better known as “parental language” — appears to be nearly universal among humans around the world.
In the largest study of its kind, more than 40 scientists participated in the collection and analysis of 1,615 voice recordings made by 410 parents on 6 continents, in 18 languages, from diverse communities: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, internet-savvy and off-grid, from the hunter-gatherers of Tanzania to the urban dwellers of Beijing.
The results, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behaviorshow that in each of these cultures, the way parents talk and sing to their children differs from the way they communicate with adults — and that these differences are deeply similar from one group to another.
We tend to speak in a higher pitch, with a lot of variability, like “Ohh, hello, you’re a baby!” said Courtney Hilton, a psychologist at Haskins Laboratories at Yale University and lead author of the study. Cody Moser, a graduate student in cognitive science at the University of California at Merced and another lead author, adds.
When people tend to sing lullabies or talk to their infants, they tend to do it the same way.
Cody Moser, graduate student in cognitive science at the University of California, Merced
The results suggest that baby talk and songs have a function independent of cultural and social forces. They provide a starting point for future research on babies and, to some extent, help to remedy the lack of diverse representation in psychology. To make cross-cultural claims about human behavior requires studies from many different societies.
“I’m probably the most published author on this topic so far, and I’m shocked by this study,” said University of California, Los Angeles cognitive scientist Greg Bryant. , which was not associated with this new research. “Anywhere you go in the world, where people talk to babies, you hear these sounds. »
close to animals
Sounds are used throughout the animal kingdom to convey emotions and signal information, including impending danger or sexual attraction. These sounds have similarities between species: a human listener can distinguish between happy and sad noises made by animals, from chickadees and alligators to pigs and pandas. It is therefore not surprising that human noises also carry a commonly recognizable emotional valence.
Scientists have long claimed that the sounds humans make with their babies perform a number of important developmental and evolutionary functions. As Samuel Mehr, a psychologist and director of the Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories, who designed the new study, pointed out, lonely human babies are “very bad at their job of surviving.”
The weird things we do with our voices when staring at a newborn baby not only help us survive, but also help us learn language and communication.
For example, parent language may help some infants better memorize words and allow them to associate sounds with mouth shapes, which makes sense of the chaos around them. Similarly, lullabies can soothe a crying child, and a higher pitched voice can hold their attention better. “You can push air into your vocal tract, create these tones and rhythms, and it’s like giving the baby a painkiller,” Samuel Mehr said.
But in making these arguments, scientists, mostly in Western and developed countries, have widely assumed that parents in all cultures modify their voices to speak to infants. “It was a risky assumption,” said Casey Lew-Williams, a psychologist and director of Princeton University’s Baby Lab, who did not contribute to the new study.
[Les conversations et les chansons des bébés] seem to be a launching pad for language learning, [mais] there are cultures where adults don’t talk to children as often — and others where they talk to them a lot.
Casey Lew-Williams, psychologist and director of Princeton University’s Baby Lab
Theoretical coherence, although sympathetic, runs the risk of “overshadowing the richness and texture of cultures”.
Many differences
This new study found that the sounds of parents’ language differed in 11 ways from those of conversations and songs of adults around the world. Some of these differences may seem obvious. For example, babies’ speech is higher pitched than adults’, and babies’ songs are softer than adults’.
But to test whether people have an innate awareness of these differences, the researchers created a game — Who’s Listening? — played online by more than 50,000 people speaking 199 languages and from 187 countries. Participants had to decide if a song or speech was for a baby or an adult.
The researchers found that listeners were able to tell with around 70% accuracy when sounds were directed at babies, even if they had no knowledge of the language and culture of the person making them. “The style of the music was different, but the vibration, for lack of a scientific term, was the same,” said Caitlyn Placek, an anthropologist at Ball State University who helped collect the Jenu Kuruba recordings. a tribe in India. “The essence is there. »
But it is not yet clear how these cross-cultural similarities fit into existing theories of development.
In the future, researchers will need to determine which items on this list are important for language learning. And that’s why this kind of work is so cool — it can spread.
Casey Lew-Williams, psychologist and director of Princeton University’s Baby Lab
Samuel Mehr agrees. “Part of a psychologist’s job is to step back and look at how weird and amazing we are,” he said.
This article was originally published in the New York Times.