We’ve all seen it, we’ve all found it slightly distressing, we’ve all done it: talk to a baby as if it were… a baby.
“Hi, Mom’s cutest thing!”, you say, thinning your voice. The baby doesn’t understand any of your unintelligible gibberish and stunned smile, but… “Wow, cute, Mommy’s beauty!”
It may or may not be helpful to know, but researchers recently concluded that this way of speaking to a baby with higher intonation and singing — an affective language more technically known as “mamanhês” — appears to be nearly universal among humans around the world. . In the largest study of its kind to date, more than 40 scientists collaborated to collect and analyze 1,615 voice recordings of 410 mothers and fathers on six continents, in 18 languages, people from diverse communities: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, netizens or not, from hunters and gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing.
Published recently in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the study showed that in each of these societies the way mothers and fathers speak and sing to their babies differs from how they communicate with adults — and that these differences are profoundly similar from one group to another.
“We tend to talk to babies in the highest pitched voice, like, ‘Hey cutest thing, cutest little baby!'” said psychologist Courtney Hilton of Haskins Laboratories at Yale University and lead author of the study. Cody Moser, the other lead author, a graduate student in cognitive science at the University of California at Merced, added, “When people sing lullabies or talk to their babies, they tend to do it the same way.”
The findings suggest that mothering and baby singing fulfill a function that is independent of cultural and social forces. They provide a starting point for future research on babies and, to some extent, make up for the lack of diverse representation in psychology. Making cross-cultural claims about human behavior requires studies of many different societies. Now we have a large study of this nature.
“I may be the person who has written the most scientific papers on this topic so far, and this study simply far outstrips my research,” commented Greg Bryant, a cognitive scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles and not affiliated with the new research. “Anywhere in the world where people are talking to babies, you will hear these sounds.”
Sound is used throughout the animal kingdom to convey emotion and information, including conveying danger alerts and communicating sexual attraction. There are similarities between the sounds produced by different species: a human listener can distinguish between happy and sad noises made by animals, from titmice and alligators to pigs and pandas. So it is perhaps not surprising that human noises also have the ability to transmit commonly recognizable emotions.
It is not new that scientists claim that the sounds made by humans with their babies fulfill a series of important functions in the development and evolution of children. As Samuel Mehr, a psychologist and director of The Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories who conceived the new study, pointed out, lonely human babies “have a really hard time staying alive.” The weird things we do with our voices when we look at a newborn not only help the baby survive, but teach them language and communication.
For example, Mamanhês can help babies memorize words better and associate sounds with shapes taken by the mouth, something that gives meaning to the chaos that surrounds them. Lullabies can soothe a crying baby, and a higher-pitched voice may be better for getting his attention. “You can push air through your vocal tract, creating these tones and rhythms, and it’s like giving a baby a pain reliever,” Mehr said.
But when making these arguments, scientists, particularly in developed Western countries, have generally assumed that parents in different cultures change their voices when talking to babies. “It was a risky assumption,” said psychologist Casey Lew-Williams, director of the Baby Lab at Princeton University. He did not contribute to the new study. Lew-Williams noted that Mamanese and lullabies “tend to act as a gateway to language learning,” but that “there are some cultures where adults don’t talk to babies as often — and others where they talk a lot.” “. For him, theoretical consistency is pleasant, but it runs the risk of “going over the diversity and texture of cultures”.
The new study found that Mamanese sounds differ in 11 ways from adult speech and song around the world. Some of these differences may seem obvious. For example, the intonation used when talking to babies is higher than when talking to adults, and baby songs are softer than adult songs. But to test whether people are innately aware of these differences, the researchers created a game, “Who’s Listening?“, which was played online by over 50,000 people from 187 countries, speaking in 199 languages. Participants were asked to point out whether a song or line was being addressed to a baby or an adult.
The researchers found that listeners could point with 70% accuracy when the sounds were aimed at babies, even when they were completely unaware of the language and culture of the person making the sounds. “The musical style was different, but the vibe of the music, in the absence of a scientific term, seemed the same,” explained Caitlyn Placek, an anthropologist at Ball State University who helped collect recordings from the Jenu Kuruba tribe in India. “The essence is present.”
But there is still no consensus on how these cross-cultural similarities fit with existing development theories. “Going forward, scientists will have to figure out which things on this list are important for language learning,” Lew-Williams said. “That’s why this kind of work is so cool: it can spread.”
Mehr agrees. “Part of being a psychologist is taking a step back and seeing how bizarre and amazing we are,” he said.
Translation by Clara Allain.
