We've all seen it, we've all cringed at it, and we've all done it ourselves.
Your voice is like a rapturously accommodating Walmart employee. The baby is completely confused by your warble and doofus smile.
The sing-songy baby talk seems to be universal to humans around the world, regardless of whether it helps to know it. In the most wide-ranging study of its kind, more than 40 scientists helped to gather and analyze 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents on six continents, in 18 languages from diverse communities.
The results, published recently in the journal Nature Human Behavior, showed that in every one of these cultures, the way parents speak and sing to their infants differed from the way they communicate with adults.
The principal author of the study said, "We tend to speak in this higher pitch, high variability, like, 'Ohh, heeelloo, you're a baaybee!'" When people tend to talk to their infants, they tend to do so in the same way as when they produce lullabies.
The findings show that baby talk and baby song serve a function. They give a jumping off point for future baby research and tackle the lack of diversity in psychology. Studies from many different societies are needed to make cross-cultural claims. There is a large one.
Greg Bryant is a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who was not associated with the new research. People are talking to babies and you hear the sounds.
In the animal kingdom sound is used to convey emotion and signal information. Humans can distinguish between happy and sad noises made by animals. It's not surprising that human noises carry a common emotion.
According to scientists, the sounds humans make with their babies serve a number of important functions. According to Samuel Mehr, a psychologist and director of The Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories, solitary human babies are really bad at staying alive. When we stare at a newborn, we do strange things with our voices that help us survive.
Parentese can help some infants remember words better, and it allows them to piece together sounds with mouth shapes, which makes sense to the chaotic environment around them. Liddles can soothe a crying baby and a higher pitched voice can hold their attention. Dr. Mehr said that it was like giving the baby an opiate.
Scientists mostly in Western countries have assumed that parents modify their voices to talk to infants. Lew-Williams did not contribute to the new study but said that it was a risky assumption. Baby talk and song seem to provide an on-ramp for language learning, but there are some cultures where adults don't talk as often to kids. He said that the risk of "washing over the richness and texture of cultures" is caused by theoretical consistency.
The study of psychology is actually the study of American college students according to a popular joke. White, urban-residing researchers are overrepresented in psychology and the questions they ask and the people they include in their studies are often shaped by their culture.
"I think people don't realize how much that bleeds into how we understand behavior," said Dorsa Amir, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. There are different ways of being a person.
Dr. Mehr searched for universal characteristics of music. Music was present in every society he examined. A vindicating finding and a rich data set raised more questions about how similar the music is in different cultures. People in different cultures think the same about music.
The sounds of parentese were found to be different in 11 ways. It might seem obvious that some of these differences are different. Baby talk is higher pitched than adult talk and baby song is less smooth than adult song. The researchers created a game that was played online by more than 50,000 people. People were asked if a song or a speech was being addressed to a baby or an adult.
When the sounds were aimed at babies, the researchers found that people were able to tell with about 70% accuracy, even though they were completely unfamiliar with the language and culture of the person making them. Caitlyn Placek, an anthropologist at Ball State University, said that the vibe of the music was the same as the style. It's there.
In a way that brought on new questions and realizations, the new study listed out the worldwide characteristics of baby and adult communication.
When talking to babies, people tend to try out a lot of different vowels. Adults sing to each other in similar ways around the world. The melody of a song is similar to that of baby talk.
One of the things that humans are wired up to do is listen to music.
The jury is still out on how these similarities fit into the theories of development. The field will have to figure out which of the things in the laundry list are important for language learning. This type of work can spread.
Dr. Mehr said yes. He said that part of being a psychologist is looking at how crazy we are.
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