Oliver Whang, ‘Parentese’ is Truly a Lingua Franca, Global Study Finds, NYTimes, July 24, 2022.
Regardless of whether it helps to know it, researchers recently determined that this sing-songy baby talk — more technically known as “parentese” — seems to be nearly universal to humans around the world. 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: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, internet savvy and off the grid, from hunter gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing. [...]
“We tend to speak in this higher pitch, high variability, like, ‘Ohh, heeelloo, you’re a baaybee!’” said Courtney Hilton, a psychologist at Haskins Laboratories at Yale University and a principal author of the study. Cody Moser, a graduate student studying cognitive science at the University of California, Merced, and the other principal author, added: “When people tend to produce lullabies or tend to talk to their infants, they tend to do so in the same way.”
The findings suggest that baby talk and baby song serve a function independent of cultural and social forces.
Who's listening?
In the new study, the sounds of parentese were found to differ in 11 ways from adult talk and song around the world. Some of these differences might seem obvious. For instance, baby talk is higher pitched than adult talk, and baby song is smoother than adult song. But to test whether people have an innate awareness of these differences, the researchers created a game — Who’s Listening? — that was played online by more than 50,000 people speaking 199 languages from 187 countries. Participants were asked to determine whether a song or a passage of speech was being addressed to a baby or an adult.
The researchers found that listeners were able to tell with about 70 percent accuracy when the sounds were aimed at babies, even when they were totally unfamiliar with the language and culture of the person making them. “The style of the music was different, but the vibe of it, for lack of a scientific term, felt the same,” said Caitlyn Placek, an anthropologist at Ball State University who helped to collect recordings from the Jenu Kuruba, a tribe in India. “The essence is there.”
The new study’s acoustic analysis also listed out these worldwide characteristics of baby and adult communication in a way that brought on new questions and realizations.
For instance, 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 happens to be quite similar to the way adults sing to each other around the world. Baby talk also closely matches the melody of song — “the ‘songification’ of speech, if you like,” Dr. Hilton said.
There's more at the link.
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The original research behind this article:
Hilton, C.B., Moser, C.J., Bertolo, M. et al. Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures. Nat Hum Behav (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01410-x
Abstract
When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations across cultures. We collected 1,615 recordings of infant- and adult-directed speech and song produced by 410 people in 21 urban, rural and small-scale societies. Infant-directedness was reliably classified from acoustic features only, with acoustic profiles of infant-directedness differing across language and music but in consistent fashions. We then studied listener sensitivity to these acoustic features. We played the recordings to 51,065 people from 187 countries, recruited via an English-language website, who guessed whether each vocalization was infant-directed. Their intuitions were more accurate than chance, predictable in part by common sets of acoustic features and robust to the effects of linguistic relatedness between vocalizer and listener. These findings inform hypotheses of the psychological functions and evolution of human communication.
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