The Secrets Behind Baby Talk

Baby Talk. Put a cute baby in front of someone and suddenly the cutesy, kuchi-coo-stuff begins. It's something that's so common, it's almost automatic. But why do we do that when we see a baby? Welcome to BabyLab, a babyology podcast produced in collaboration with Western Sydney University where we are going to dig deep, deep into the science behind how babies think. Coming up on this episode of BabyLab, we're finding out how babies learn to talk. And why sounding silly and talking like a baby might not be so silly after all. In just a moment. We pretending to talk on the phone. A baby talk. It's kind of cringeworthy when you listen back to it. Nice for kadoos. My name's Jamila Rizvi, I'm an author and a commentator, but most importantly I'm a mum to three-year-old Ruffy. I like to think that I'm not someone who does the baby talk thing. Maybe I do and just don't realise it. But when I know it is other adults talking to my boy who's three now and they crouched down and they put on that funny little voice, I'm immediately taken back. Why do people do that? And he seems to think the same thing. He looks at them with the sort of disdain that only a toddler can muster. Who are you, lady? And do you think I'm dumb? It's definitely unconscious, I think, when you're using baby talk. But maybe as a parent I should be rethinking. Maybe there's something I'm missing. I think a lot of the time people would be like, I don't do that. But if he's to give a baby in front of them, especially a really smiley baby, at some point they're going to speak silly to them. Dr. Krista Lam Kassatari is an infant researcher at the Marx Institute at Weston Sydney University. And at times people have said that that's probably not such a good thing. But the research that we have been doing and that has been done for a couple of decades actually shows it's really important to speak in a funny way when you're talking to a baby. It's helping them with language development, helping them pay attention to speech, and helping them be interested in someone talking to them and wanting to be a part of that conversation. I remember being told that using baby talk was talking down to your child. And if you wanted them to learn to talk properly, you should just talk to them like you would to another adult. So it is undeniable that babies learn language from the speech that they hear around them. But this has not always been accepted in the field. That's Marina Kalashnikova. She's a researcher in infancy studies at Weston Sydney University. We've always been interested in learning how children learn language. And I think that this fascination comes from the fact that only humans have language. And language is one of the most complex systems that a human being can acquire. And our little babies learn it in just a couple of years and they're remarkable at doing it. Already by the time of their first birthday, they're saying their first words, which is very fascinating if we think about the fact that they cannot walk at that point. But the question that arises there is would capacities babies bring to the task within them? And would are the environmental factors that allow them to learn language? But experts have very different opinions on how language actually develops. One of the most well-known linguists, Norm Chomsky, he proposed an argument that is known as the poverty of the stimulus. And what this argument suggests is that it is almost impossible for a child to learn language from the language that they hear from adults. And if you think about it, that's not completely an outrageous claim. Because when we talk to each other, we don't produce the cleanest form of language. We often interrupt each other. We quite often don't finish our sentences. Or sometimes we speak so fast that it's not really clear what sounds we're producing. So that's what led these researchers to suggest that babies need some kind of internal structure that allows them to basically navigate through this messy input and still learn language successfully. Well that makes sense, doesn't it? All this baby talk is just getting in the way, right? No, most experts wouldn't say that at all. Most experts would say that it's very beneficial. Professor Dennis Burnham from Western Sydney University has been fascinated with this question for decades. We know that when mothers talk to infants, they do a whole lot of things. The pitch goes up and down and there's more emotion in their voice. The third thing that we focus on a lot is exaggeration of the vowel sounds. So we feel the tower. Are you ready? When parents talk to infants, they exaggerate that space between the one hour. Eight. Very good. Baby talk is fascinating because it's something that we do instinctively and we do automatically. So for us as researchers, it's quite challenging to figure out what are the sources of baby talk because we all do it when we see a baby. After being long dismissed by early linguists, this playful, cute way that we talked to our babies started getting a lot of attention from researchers around the world. Around the 80s and 90s, people started paying attention to baby talk. And the argument there was that, well, maybe the type of language that baby's here is not so messy because we don't speak to babies in the same way that we speak to adults. So we actually slow down and we exaggerate some of the structures in our speech to help babies learn it better. And that's where really researchers started focusing on baby talk. All languages of the world have an E, U and R sounds. And these are sort of like the limits of our, of the vowels that we can make. All the other vowels are enclosed in that space between E, U and R. We know that when parents and even older siblings, three-year-olds, five-year-olds, talk to babies, they exaggerate that vowel space. They don't know they're doing it. So you'll say to the baby, look, there's the sheep and the degree to which they exaggerate those vowels. We relate to infants later vocabulary. So if mothers exaggerate the vowels more, infants have better vocabulary at either a month. This was in a way against what Chomsky was saying because Chomsky said, "It doesn't matter what the input is, it doesn't matter what the parents say, the child's just going to learn it language anyway." No, it does matter. It doesn't matter what the mother says. You know, the mother keeps one step ahead of the child in terms of complexity and those sorts of things and the child learns from the mother. So if we exaggerate our vowels when talking to our babies, it can actually increase their little vocabularies. It is fascinating to think that we're subconsciously doing all these things when we use that silly cutesy-coo baby voice. Maybe it's not so silly after all. You should use baby talk and you shouldn't feel bad about using baby talk. It's one of the best tools that we have to engage our babies in interaction. Even before they're saying their first words, babies are little sponges and they're absorbing everything about the environment around them. And so if you immerse them with infant-directed speech by using the modulation in your voice, you're making words stand out for them. So moms who do use infant-directed speech and hyper-articulate their vowels or make the sounds clearer between vowels like "e, u" and "a" have babies who are better at picking apart the pieces of the speech stream. Because to a baby who is just learning what a word is, it's a continuous stream of speech that's that they're hearing. And so if you can highlight pieces of that speech stream, then they can start pulling words out of the sentences that you're saying. There's also the way in which parents emphasize focus words in a sense. Look at the doggy. Yeah, there's the doggy. So there'll be repetition and say there's a repetition of a particular two-syllable utterance. Doggy. Doggy. Oh, that must be a separate unit. That must be something important. That must be some little unit in this stream of speech that I'm hearing. It's like if you're listening to a foreign language that you've never heard before. If you're on the train, listen to Cantonese or Slovakian and somebody says, "Where's the words starting in?" You wouldn't have a clue because you don't know what the words are. So the baby has to work this out. If you think about this, it's really, really difficult. So the infant uses all the possible cues that they can and the parents help them to do this unconsciously by the way in which they use infant direct speech or parent use. Infant directed speech. That's the technical term for the googoo gargaster. One, two, three. Something that totally blew me away in the research we found on this was that babies can hear some form of language for three whole months before they're even born. The first study that was actually done with the theme tune from neighbours. There was a group of mothers who watched neighbours religiously and a group of mothers who did not. And then when the babies were born they played the neighbours tune. When the babies who whose mothers watched neighbours preferred the neighbours tune to the other tune. Not only they hear the stuff but they actually remember what they've heard in the world. Dennis Burnham says that this is an important clue as to how babies learn language. When they were born what became apparent was that they remembered their mother's voice and their native language was familiar to them. But it was the prosody or the international or the ups and downs of the mother's voice, not just the voice quality. Okay so it was more the rhythm of the mother's voice. Because if you play the mother's voice backwards or if you get the mother's to read something out of a book backwards, babies don't prefer their voice. Which then suggests that what they hear in the womb is the low frequency information, the ups and downs. Like I say you're listening to somebody in a room next door. You can't hear the words but you can hear the whew, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew. So babies would prefer the timing in their own language. So again that would be the rhythm of the language that they'd learnt. In English most words have a strong weak stress pattern like dot table. Right? About 20% of words have a weak strong stress like about or against. So that's one cue that they can use like the stress pattern. I mean babies don't get born and say okay now language, I've got to get this language thing down. They don't do that. I mean they don't know what language is. They just know what's familiar to them, what's novel to them, what's scarce and what doesn't scare them. When I was pregnant I always felt that it was kind of weird to talk to my son when he was still in the womb but my husband loved doing it. He used to play all sorts of music and chat to Ruffy for months and months and months before he was born. It's kind of nice to think that my husband was laying down a sort of acoustic blueprint for my little boy to follow after Ruffy was born. In the womb Ruffy was becoming familiar with his parents speech patterns. You're listening to BabyLab, I'm your host, Jamila Rispy. Coming up we're going to go and visit the actual baby lab where all of this fascinating research comes from. We'll be back after this short break. In this episode we've been digging deep into the science that explains how our babies learn to talk and what that silly voice we reserve exclusively for cute kids is all about. At the Marks Institute at Western Sydney University there is a real life baby lab. This is where the magic happens and we get to understand how babies think. Well that's what we're trying to do anyway. It's not invasive, there's no needles or scary medical equipment anywhere in sight. It actually looks more like a childcare centre or a preschool. There are screens for kids to watch pictures and there are eye-tracking cameras hidden to monitor the baby's attention and where they're focusing. There's an observation room so that researchers can record and observe interactions babies have with their parents, with other babies and with the researchers themselves. Almost two decades of research has been conducted here now and it's all about understanding how infants learn to communicate. Volunteer families come in and researchers have the chance to run lots of fun clever experiments with them. So we've just given this mother a toy sheep, baby shoe and a toy shark. We know that when we talk to babies we tend to exaggerate the way that we speak so we emphasise the difference between ee, u and r in the words sheep, shoe and shark when we're playing with a baby. So by measuring how parents are saying the word sheep, shoe and shark we can see if they're speaking more clearly and how this relates to their vocabulary development as they grow older. I'm Roxanne and this is my daughter Ainslie who's one. I found it very interesting and exciting to learn about how babies learn what they pick up, what they don't. Even little things, even the way how high your voice is, how low it is, the way you ask a question how your voice naturally goes up. All these cues from their parents, I don't realize how important it was until I came here. So it's one thing that sort of I guess just came naturally to me as a parent when I had Liam speaking to him, I guess you call it baby talk, using baby talk, speaking to him. Some people I guess laugh or think it's amusing that you might speak to your child in such a way, but yeah to hear that it's actually really valuable for them to learn language that way, encourage me to continue and to really emphasise that and also to speak to my husband about that too. So yeah I guess it's changed the way that he speaks to our children as well. And it's often come up in mother's groups conversations, especially recently now that in Audrey's mother's group they're all sort of getting to that age where they're babbling a lot and comments from other mum saying, "I don't know how what I'm meant to say to them to the baby or how I'm meant to speak to them. Am I talking enough and I can at least pass on that yes, don't be afraid to speak to them as if they are a baby." And that's probably why we're so interested and so passionate about being. My husband has brought the kids as well where we're both so interested and passionate about being the kids here to help participate in these studies as it benefits so many people. Not just the researchers but also like we're talking about psychologist, speech pathologist, teachers, other health professionals but parents as well. Recording play sessions between parents and their babies, then doing detailed acoustic analysis. Researchers at the baby lab can see how all the different features of baby talk come together and they can see how this might be helping babies to learn language. Decades of research on baby talk are showing that baby talk is good for babies because it engages them in conversations so it's highlighting that, "Hey, I'm talking to you. You should pay attention to me and I'm going to teach you things without us necessarily trying to do that. It's just part of interacting, part of social interactions and part of them being a human being." And babies have very very short attention spans. So anything that you can do to keep a baby paying attention to you is a good thing and so when you exaggerate and you play with your voice and you make it really interesting then the baby is going to keep watching you or keep listening to you or maybe if they're doing something wrong as they get older and they're learning to crawl and walk and get around and do things that maybe they shouldn't be doing. If you can modulate your voice and you can change your voice to get their attention then yeah they're going to stop trying to poke things in a PowerPoint or they might freeze when they've crawled to the top of the lounge and they're about to topple off and you can do that by using your voice because you might be on the other side of the room so you're not going to go over and catch them. And so it's really important for their social and emotional development as well because they don't understand when you say "oh are you feeling happy today?" but if you give them a happy voice then it neutralizes the way that they're feeling and keeps them in a happy state and you don't want a baby to be stressed because the more stress you have then you release all the stress hormones like cortisol and that's actually really bad for your brain. So you want to keep them in a happy state so that their brains relaxed and can be taken in everything in the environment around them. By now I've got a whole new appreciation for baby talk. Perhaps I'll even stop judging people when I hear them doing it at the supermarket. Baby talk is central to a whole lot of research that's being done on early learning so it's going to come up a lot in this series. For now though I think it's important to note that baby talk is actually a tool we can use to break up language into more manageable pieces. We can use it to point babies in the right direction of the start and the end of words and also to recognize various emotions in other people. Before we leave though did you know that you can actually speak three different kinds of baby talk? And the way that we know this is because researchers like Krista Lamb Cassattari have found that it's actually the baby and not the parent who is teaching us to talk in this way. - We actually can convey different emotions in the way that we're talking to babies. We use comforting tones. We also use approving tones and we can use directive tones in our voice. And babies can tell the difference between these different emotions. - The sort of speech that babies prefer at three months, six months, and nine months are exactly the sort of speech that mothers produce at three months, six months, and nine months. The parent's speech to the infant is not just the parent consciously or unconsciously trying to teach the infant about language or teach them about social interaction. The infant is an active partner in this. The infant actually asks for what they need. - So around three months when babies are quite young and need a lot of comfort and have a lot of sleep and you're constantly sort of shushing them and getting them back to sleep so their little brains can keep developing, mums use a predominantly comforting tone of voice. As babies get a little bit older and a little bit more mobile and start smiling back and learn to babble and learn to sit up and all of those sorts of things, mums use more of an approving voice when they're talking to their babies. By around nine months of age, mums tend to use a more directive tone of voice. I think his own babies are learning to crawl and get up to a bit of mischief. And so that tells us that there is a really important and dynamic interplay between a caregiver and a baby. - Yeah, babies can communicate to us, not actually talking but providing cues and gestures and things like that that asks for certain levels of speech and complexity of the language. But we don't know exactly how it all happens. - Mums and babies give each other feedback about whether they're doing the right thing and when mums give them special messages in the tone of their voice, babies will smile and look longer and listen longer and pay attention longer because they like to receive those kinds of messages at different ages. You need the baby to be responding to what you're doing to encourage you to do more of it. And responsive parents will really pay attention to what signals their babies are giving them. That's right. Baby talk was probably their idea. - Babies don't respond to adults talking to other adults. Okay, so it's not just the number of words that they hear. It's the number of words they hear addressed to them and the words that are addressed to them are usually exactly the sort of sounds and the sort of complexity that they want to hear at that level of their development. This really supports this idea that right from birth there's this tiny little microcosm happening where they really understand each other but neither are noted later. - Thanks for listening to BabyLab, a Babyology podcast series, produced in collaboration with Western Sydney University. If you've got any comments or baby science questions of your own, then please get in touch. We're at [email protected]. Coming up in the next episode of BabyLab, we're talking about the magic of the first word, where it comes from and how it could help us understand the very origins of human language. And if you enjoyed this episode and think other curious parents might be interested, definitely let them know about it. I'm Jamila Rizvi and I'll chat to you soon. BabyLab is hosted by me, Jamila Rizvi. The series is produced and edited by Caitlin Gibson and Tim Richie is head of podcast. - The BabyLab team would love to hear from you. In the final episode of this podcast series, we'll be answering your questions. Have you ever stared at your baby late at night and wondered what on earth is going on inside that tiny head of theirs? Do you have a burning science question about your baby? Or babies in general? email [email protected] and stay subscribed for the final episode eight where your questions will be answered by an expert.