A universal baby language? | Brain & Psycho

You avule all or even as pretty? Yes, you once spoke like that. To a baby, perhaps yours, or that of a friend, in any case it is a safe bet that it will happen to you one day. Don’t panic, it’s normal. The tone of your voice, its intensity, the rhythm of your words are a little clownish, to the point that this phenomenon has been studied under the name of baby talk (in French “mamanais”). And what is funny, and what Courtney Hilton and her colleagues at Harvard University have just confirmed, is that certain characteristics of this language are universal.

In these experiments, acoustic analysis software sifted through more than 1,600 recordings of lyrics and songs, from urban, rural and traditional societies on six different continents. The results revealed several specific characteristics that adults of all cultures adopt when talking to a baby: for example, the voice is higher and louder, with a more variable pitch, while the contrasts between vowels are accentuated. . Songs aimed at toddlers share other properties, such as the tendency to soften the voice. In another part of the experiment, more than 50,000 people from 187 different countries listened to the recordings, and managed to guess – even though the recording was mostly in a language they didn’t understand at all. – when it came to baby talk. In other words, you might know if a Javanese is talking to a friend or a baby, without ever having learned a word of Javanese.

For researchers, this universality is a sign that the shape of the baby talk is shaped by its functions. It would be used, for example, to facilitate the learning of speech (hence the marked contrasts between the vowels), to capture the attention of babies (hence the more intense voice), or, in the case of songs, to soothe them. The bond woven by language goes beyond words: for the American psychologist Anne Fernald, “the communicative force of vocalizations [parentales] does not come from their arbitrary meaning in a linguistic code, but rather from an immediate power stemming from their musicality, that of awakening and alerting, calming and delighting”.