We’ve all seen it, we’ve all seen it, we’ve done it ourselves: talked to a kid like he was, you know, a kid.
“Oh hello, baby!” You say, your voice sounds like an enthusiastically friendly Walmart employee. Baby is totally stunned by your goofy wariness and your shamelessly doofus grin, but “Baby SO KUUUUUT!”
Even though it may help to know it, researchers recently determined that this sing-song baby — technically known as a “parents” — seems almost universal to humans around 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 different communities: rural and urban, isolated and metropolitan. Internet-savvy and off-grid, from hunter-gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing.
The results, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, showed that in each of these cultures, the way parents talked and sang to their infants differed from the way they communicated with adults. — and those differences were strikingly similar from group to group. ,
“We speak in this high pitch, high variability, like, ‘Oh, Heelu, you’re a byby! 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 other lead author, said: “When people produce lullabies or talk to their babies, that’s what they do.”
Findings suggest that baby talk and baby song act independent of cultural and social forces. They take a leap forward for future infant research and, to some extent, deal with the lack of diverse representation in psychology. Making cross-cultural claims about human behavior requires the study of many different societies. Now, there’s a big one.
“I’m probably the author with the most papers on this topic by far, and it’s just blowing my stuff up,” said Greg Bryant, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the new research. “Wherever you go in the world, where people are talking to children, you hear these voices.”
Sound is used throughout the animal kingdom to convey emotion and signals, including impending danger and sexual attraction. Such sounds demonstrate similarities between species: a human listener can distinguish between happy and sad noises made by animals, from chicks and crocodiles to pigs and pandas. So it may come as no surprise that human noise also normally carries recognizable emotional validity.
Scientists have long argued that the sounds humans make with their babies serve 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, human children alone are “really bad at their job of surviving.” The weird things we do with our voices when staring at a newborn not only help us survive but teach language and communication.
For example, parenting can help some babies remember words better, and it allows them to associate sounds together with the shape of the mouth, which senses the chaos around them. In addition, lullabies can soothe a crying baby, and loud sounds can grab their attention better. “You can push air through your vocal tract, creating these tones and rhythms, and it’s like giving a baby an analgesic,” Dr. Mehr said.
But making this argument, scientists in most Western, developed countries have largely assumed that parents from different cultures modify their voices to talk to infants. “It was a risky assumption,” said Casey Lew-Williams, psychologist and director of the Baby Lab at Princeton University, who did not contribute to the new study. Dr. Lew-Williams notes that baby talk and song “provide an on-ramp for language learning” but that “there are some cultures where adults don’t talk to children as often – and where they do not talk to them as often.” Let’s talk.” Theoretical consistency, while good, risks “washing out the richness and textures of cultures,” he said.
An increasingly popular joke among academics holds that the study of psychology is actually the study of American college undergraduates. Because white, urban-dwelling researchers are over-represented in psychology, the questions they ask and the people they include in their studies are often shaped by their culture.
“I think people don’t realize this is how we understand behavior,” said Dorsa Amir, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who collected recordings from Shuar in Ecuador for the new study. “But there are very different ways to be human.”
In a previous study, Dr. Meher led the search for universal characteristics of music. Music was present in each of the 315 different societies he visited. A perfect find and a rich data set, but one that raised more questions: How similar is music in each culture? Do people from different cultures view the same music differently?
In the new study, parental voices were found to differ in 11 ways from adult conversation and song around the world. Some of these differences may seem obvious. For example, baby talk is louder than adult, 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? – which was played online by over 50,000 people speaking 199 languages from 187 countries. Participants were asked to determine whether a song or speech was being addressed to a child or an adult.
The researchers found that listeners were able to tell with about 70 percent accuracy that the sounds were aimed at children, even when they were completely unfamiliar with the language and culture of the person making them. “The style of the music was different, but for the lack of a scientific term, it felt the same vibe,” said Ball State University anthropologist Caitlin Placek. India. “The essence is there.”
The new study’s acoustic analysis cataloged these worldwide characteristics of child and adult communication in a way that led to new questions and realizations.
For example, people tend to try several different vowel sounds and combinations when talking to children, “exploring the vowel space,” as Mr. Moser puts it. It happens in much the same way that adults around the world sing to each other. Dr. Hilton said, Baby Talk also matches the song’s melody – “the ‘lyricalization’ of speech, if you like.”
This could potentially point to the source of the evolution of music – perhaps “listening to music is one of the things humans are just ready to do,” Dr Mehr said.
But the jury is still out on how these cross-cultural similarities fit into existing theories of evolution. “The field going forward will need to figure out which items on 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. Meher agreed. “Part of being a psychologist is to step back and see how strange and unreliable we are,” he said.
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)