Baby talk: Nothing silly about it

SOME PARENTS BELIEVE BABY TALK IS AWKWARD BUT EXPERTS BEG TO DIFFER SAYING IT PROVIDES BABIES A GREAT LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Babies not only prefer listening to these exaggerated contours, but they also learn new words more easily from them |

All around the world, parents talk differently to babies than they do to adults. With their young kids, parents switch into a mode of communication known to linguists as “motherese” or infant-directed speech, and known more commonly as baby talk, a form of speech featuring long pauses and a roller coaster of pitch changes.

For example, picture the upward swing in pitch that our voices take toward the end of a question (“Do you want to go to the park today?”): It’s much more dramatic when we address young children than adults.

While parents may feel a bit silly using baby talk, they shouldn’t: Babies not only prefer listening to these exaggerated contours, but they also learn new words more easily from them. By highlighting the structure of speech, such as the differences between the vowels “a” and “o,” motherese helps babies translate a torrent of sound into meaningful units of language.

Timbre changes

Although scientists know a lot about the changes in rhythm and pitch in infant-directed speech, we know much less about the role of timbre, or tone colour, which includes the breathiness, roughness or nasality in a voice.

The timbre of an instrument (whether buzzy, warm or twangy) clearly affects how we experience music, but its role in language is less obvious.

When my colleagues and I looked into the tone colour of baby talk, we made some surprising discoveries. Mothers change their overall timbre when speaking to babies, almost as if they’re morphing their voice into a different instrument to address these unique little listeners.

Timbre is a complex acoustic feature that helps us distinguish the unique flavours of sounds around us.

When an orchestra tunes up, all instruments play the same pitch (A440 hertz), but we can still hear their distinct textures (timbres): breathy woodwinds, buzzy brass, mellow strings, etc. As soon as you hear a snippet of music, you can easily tell whether it’s classical, rock or country mainly because of its instrumentation, or collection of timbres.

Because timbre refers to a more complex collection of features than pitch, rhythm or volume, it is a less well-understood property of sounds.

But we do know that timbre provides an important pointer to different sound sources, thus helping us identify people, animals and objects based on their characteristic auditory “fingerprints.”

So, we wondered whether mothers might unconsciously change their overall fingerprints when talking to their babies, perhaps to signal that an important source of speech, which is highly relevant for learning, is coming their way.

Multiple languages

Being able to identify baby talk across multiple languages could give us rich information about the amount and type of language children hear at home and at preschool (for example, overheard adult conversation versus speech directed at them) across different cultural environments. This could help researchers and educators predict and improve outcomes such as vocabulary and success in school.

Our framework could also lead to new research avenues on how speakers adjust their timbre when speaking with, for example, friends, bosses, political constituents and romantic partners. ■ Elise Piazza is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Marius Catalin Iordan, a postdoctoral researcher at the institute, and Casey Lew-Williams, an assistant professor in the university’s Department of Psychology, contributed to this report.

Mothers change their overall timbre when speaking to babies, almost as if they’re morphing their voice into a different instrument to address these unique little listeners.