Some people adopt an exaggerated, slower, and singing tone when talking to a baby, a way that young children prefer to talk about adults no matter how many languages they are used to hearing.
A study with 16 laboratories from all over the world concludes that Babies up to 15 months of age pay more attention to so-called “baby talk” or infantile speech, which occurs in practically all languages and cultures.
“Babies’ speech is slower in all languages, with a more variable pitch, and is more lively and cheerful.” Some differ from others, especially in how exaggerated it is.
English, for example, has one of its most exaggerated forms, explains Megha Sundara, a professor of linguistics at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and one of the signatories to the study, which publishes Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. .
The study also indicates that babies exposed to two languages also showed more interest in speech directed to them before adult speech, and that they are interested in that infantile language at the same age as the rest.
“Crucially for parents, we found that the development of learning and attention is similar in babies whether they learn one or two languages,” said Sundara.
The team observed 333 bilingual babies (in English and Spanish) and 384 monolingual babies between the ages of 6-9 months and 12-15 months.
Each little one sat on a parent’s lap while recordings of an English-speaking mother played, with a speech addressed to babies or adults, from the left or right speakers.
Computer tracking measures the time each baby looked in the direction of each sound. “The longer they watched, the stronger their preference,” said Victoria Mateu, another author of the study.
As a result, “babies tend to pay more attention to the exaggerated sounds of baby speech”, the researcher emphasized.
In the case of bilingual children, the more exposed they were to English, the greater their preference for child language compared to that aimed at adults.
But even babies who hadn’t come into contact with English preferred children’s English language to adult speech, Mateu said.
The study, led by Concordia University in Montreal, also highlighted that babies aged 6 to 9 months whose mothers had a higher education were more likely to prefer baby talk than those of mothers with less education.
“We suspected that higher educated mothers might talk to babies more and use them more often,” Mateu said.