BABIES and puppies have a lot in common. In addition to being small and cute, they prompt mothers to change the way they speak when addressing them, modifying their speech rate, their pitch and, above all, their elocution.
A team of researchers from the US's Virginia Tech and Pacific Lutheran University and France's École Normale Supérieure-PSL set out to discover the reasons why mothers naturally adapt their speech when talking to infants.
Previous studies have shown that women who have had a child speak more clearly in the presence of a baby or a parrot.
Scientists explained this finding by the fact that they were teaching them human language. But other studies have contradicted this explanation, showing that the clarity of mothers' speech is not systematic.
Robin Panneton (Virginia Tech), Alejandrina Cristia (ENS-PSL), Caroline Taylor (Virginia Tech) and Christine Moon (Pacific Lutheran University) initially thought that mothers spoke more clearly to babies than to adults, either for educational purposes or because they felt positive emotions when interacting with them.
To test these two hypotheses, the scientists placed 10 American mothers of six-month-old children in a room. Their voices were recorded for 10 minutes as they talked to their infant, a puppy and an adult about three different objects.
The study participants described each object, talking about their characteristics and sometimes their function. The recordings were then analysed in terms of positive valence, ie, their intrinsically pleasant quality.
A universal form of language?
The research team observed that mothers expressed more positive emotions towards infants and puppies than towards adults. Their articulation was much more correct and polished than when speaking to someone their own age.
These results suggest that the mother's emotional state has an effect on her elocution and tone of voice, as the researchers explain in their study, recently published in the Journal of Child Language.
All these suprasegmental and phonetic modifications have the effect of increasing the clarity of maternal speech, which in turn facilitates language processing.
Several scientific studies suggest that "parentese" – the way parents address their newborns – helps babies learn to speak, regulate their emotions and even structure their social interactions.
What's more, it's a form of language that appears to be shared by many cultures and communities around the world, as revealed by a study published in 2022 in the journal, Nature Human Behaviour.
Some 40 scientists discovered that adults all over the world talk to babies in a similar way, after analysing 1,615 voice recordings in 18 different languages from 410 parents on six continents.
And human mothers aren't the only ones to change the way they express themselves in the presence of their young. Female dolphins do the same, as do female rhesus macaques and squirrel monkeys. – ETX Daily Up, July 4, 2023
