The next time you meet a baby you can try the following experiment: try to have a normal conversation, what is very difficult? And so much that it is difficult!
When we talk to babies, a melodic and more energetic voice comes naturally, almost as if we were singing, using simple words and short phrases or showing emotion and raising the tone at the end of each sentence. These typical characteristics of the way we address babies seem to be common in many languages.
A new study published in the journal Current Biology suggests that there are universal changes in vocal timbre when we talk to babies. The bell describes the characteristics of a voice or musical instrument. For example, the difference between the same note played on a violin or a trumpet is the timbre.
Bell Explanation
Elise Piazza, a researcher at the Princeton Institute of Neuroscience, invited 12 English-speaking mothers to the Princeton Baby Lab and recorded them talking to their babies (8 to 12 months old) and an adult. Using a standardized statistical method, they turned the recordings into “vocal footprints” with a unique frequency for each person and that makes it possible to differentiate who the voice belongs to according to the timbre.
Next, Elise and her research partners, Marius Iordan and Casey Lew-Williams, used a computer to compare speech to adults and speech to babies, demonstrating that all mothers changed the timbre of their voice when they addressed the babies.
The authors carried out several controls to demonstrate that it was not simply that mothers spoke in a more acute tone with the babies. However, the real test came when they recorded 12 other mothers who spoke 9 different languages, including Spanish, Russian and Cantonese Chinese. The algorithm again caught the same difference between speech to adults and speech to babies.
Elisa describes the change as a "way that mothers use implicitly to help babies learn language." Another hypothesis is that babies are able to detect this difference to know when they are being talked to and it is something researchers are trying to prove. It's something that would be in line with what we already know about the way we address babies: We do it to help them learn.
Patricia Kuhl has shown that speaking to babies exaggerates the differences between vowel sounds, making babies can differentiate words more easily, something that usually happens in the English, Russian and Swedish languages. Other research found that speaking to babies has the same acoustic characteristics as when we address an adult happily and the authors stated that “what is special is the way we express emotion without inhibition to babies compared to the way we express emotion in a self-conscious way when we address other adults. ”
Babies perform real feats when it comes to learning a language and already in the womb they have learned enough to know, at birth, that they prefer the voice of their mothers and their mother tongue to that of another woman or another language.Babies learn to recognize the voice of their mothers before birth
A recent study showed that premature babies in intensive care made more vocalizations when responding to adult speech. If adults stopped responding, babies noticed and also stopped responding.
When the same method was applied in five-month-old babies, they also stopped vocalizing. In fact, the more synchronized the babies were with the behavior of their caregivers at five months, the better their understanding of the language at 13 months.
In another lovely study, the researchers recorded babies between three and four months "talking" to themselves and realized that Babies expressed a wide range of emotions in their shrieks, grunts and babbles.
Clarifying a mystery
Also, this new research may solve a mystery of my own work. Last year, when we helped Imogen Heap to create a song that made babies happy, we advised her to record it in the presence of her 18-month-old daughter. According to research conducted in the 90s, babies notice the difference and prefer a type of singing similar to the type of speech we use with them. In his day I did not believe this hypothesis, but with the new way of measuring the bell we can test this theory.
Like adults, the best way babies learn language is by talking. From the beginning, babies want to join in the conversation and that is when the talk begins between mothers and newborns. Mothers often wait for babies to pause to address them and this new research underscores the idea that there is a universal signal to indicate to babies that we are addressing them.
And so much that we do it!
Author: Caspar Addyman Caspar Addyman. Professor of Developmental Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London
This article has originally been published in The Conversation. You can read the original article here.
Translated by Silvestre Urbón.
