We’ve all seen it, we’ve all shrunk to it, we’ve all done it ourselves: talking to a baby like it was, you know, a baby.
“Ooo, hello baby!” you say, your voice echoes like a passionately accommodating Walmart employee. Baby is utterly stunned by your unintelligible buzz and your shameless doofus grin, but “baby so cuuuuuute!”
Whether or not it helps to know, researchers recently found that this singing baby talk — more technically known as “parentesis” — seems to be almost universal for people all over the world. In the most comprehensive study of its kind, more than 40 scientists helped collect and analyze 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents on six continents, in 18 languages from diverse communities: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, internet-capable and off-grid, from hunter-gatherers in Tanzania to city dwellers in Beijing.
The results, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, showed that in each of these cultures, the way parents spoke and sang to their babies differed from the way they communicated with adults — and that those differ greatly from group to group. were similar.
“We tend to speak in this higher pitch, high variability, like, ‘Oh, heeelloo, you’re a baaybee!'” said Courtney Hilton, a psychologist at Haskins Laboratories at Yale University and a lead author of the study. . Cody Moser, a graduate student studying cognitive science at the University of California, Merced, and the other lead author, added: “When people tend to produce lullabies or talk to their babies, they usually do it in the same way. way.”
The findings suggest that baby talk and baby song fulfill a function independent of cultural and social forces. They provide a starting point for future baby research and to some extent address the lack of diverse representation in psychology. Making cross-cultural claims about human behavior requires studies from many different societies. Now there is a big one.
“I’m probably the author with the most articles on this topic to date, and this just blows my stuff away,” said Greg Bryant, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not associated with the new research. . “Everywhere you go in the world, where people talk to babies, you hear these sounds.”
Sound is used throughout the animal kingdom to convey emotion and signal information, including incoming danger and sexual attraction. Such sounds show similarities between species: A human listener can distinguish between happy and sad sounds made by animals, from tits and alligators to pigs and pandas. So perhaps it’s not surprising that human sounds also have a widely recognizable emotional value.
Scientists have long argued that the sounds humans make with their babies have a number of important developmental and evolutionary functions. As Samuel Mehr, a psychologist and director of The Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories who conceived the new study, noted, lonely human babies “are really bad at their job of staying alive.” The strange things we do with our voice when we stare at a newborn baby not only help us survive, but also learn language and communication.
For example, parentese can help some babies remember words betterand it allows them to merge sounds with mouth shapes, which gives meaning to the chaos around them. Lullabies can also calm a crying baby and a higher voice can hold their attention better. “You can push air through your vocal tract, create these tones and rhythms, and it’s like giving the baby a painkiller,” said Dr. mehr.
But in making these arguments, scientists, mainly in western developed countries, have largely assumed that parents in different cultures adjust their voices to talk to babies. “That was a risky assumption,” said Casey Lew-Williams, a psychologist and director of the Baby Lab at Princeton University, who did not contribute to the new study. dr. Lew-Williams noted that baby talk and singing “seem to be a stepping stone for language learning,” but that “there are some cultures where adults don’t talk to kids as much — and where they talk to them a lot.” Theoretical consistency, while beautiful, he said, it risks “overwhelming the richness and texture of cultures.”
An increasingly popular joke among academics is that the study of psychology is actually the study of American college students. Because white, urban researchers are overrepresented in psychology, the questions they ask and the people they involve in their research are often determined by their culture.
“I don’t think people realize how much that affects how we understand behavior,” said Dorsa Amir, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who collected footage of the Shuar in Ecuador for the new study. “But there are very different ways to be human.”
In a previous studyled Dr. Mehr a search for universal characteristics of music. Of the 315 different societies he looked at, music was present in every society. A justifiable finding and a rich data set, but one that raised more questions: How similar is the music in each culture? Do people in different cultures perceive the same music differently?
In the new study, the sounds of parentesis were found to differ in 11 ways from talking and singing by adults around the world. Some of these differences may seem obvious. For example, baby talk is higher than adult talk, and baby songs are softer than adult talk. But to test whether people have an innate awareness of these differences, the researchers created a game – Who is listening? — played online by more than 50,000 people speaking 199 languages from 187 countries. The participants were asked to determine whether a song or speech passage was addressed to a baby or an adult.
The researchers found that listeners could tell with about 70 percent accuracy when the sounds were aimed at babies, even if they were completely unfamiliar with the language and culture of the person making them. “The style of the music was different, but the atmosphere of it, for lack of a scientific term, felt the same,” said Caitlyn Placek, an anthropologist at Ball State University who helped collect recordings of the Jenu Kuruba, a tribe in India. “The essence is there.”
The acoustic analysis of the new study also mapped these global features of infant and adult communication in a way that raised new questions and realisations.
For example, people tend to try out many different vowel sounds and combinations when talking to babies, “exploring the vowel space,” as Mr. Moser put it. This is quite similar to the way adults all over the world sing to each other. Baby talk also closely matches the melody of a song — “the ‘songification’ of speech, if you will,” said Dr. Hilton.
This could potentially point to a developmental source of music — perhaps “listening to music is one of those things that people are just set up for,” said Dr. mehr.
But the jury is still out on how these intercultural similarities fit into existing development theories. “The field will have to figure out in the future which of the things in this laundry list are important for language learning,” said Dr. Lew Williams. “And that’s why this kind of work is so cool — it can spread.”
dr. Mehr agreed. “Part of being a psychologist is to step back and look at how weird and incredible we are,” he said.