BABY TALK
In an ambitious cross-cultural study, researchers found that adults around the world speak and sing to babies in similar ways.
We’ve all seen it, we’ve all cringed at it, we’ve all done it ourselves:
talked to a baby like it was, you know, a baby.
“Ooo, hellooooo baby!” you say, your voice lilting like a rapturously accommodating Walmart employee. Baby is utterly baffled by your unintelligible warble and your shamelessly doofus grin, but “baby so cuuuuuute!”
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.
The results, published recently in the journal Nature Human Behavior, showed that in every one of these cultures, the way parents spoke and sang to their
infants differed from the way they communicated with adults — and that those differences were...READ MORE
