Is Baby Talk Similar Across The World? New Study Says Yes

We all may be familiar with baby talk, more technically called parentese. It is the peculiar way in which adults talk to babies in their high-pitched soothing vocals. A study has now found that despite our differences, baby talk sounds similar across cultures.

The study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, found that in most cultures, the way parents communicated with their infants and the way they communicated with adults were different. And those differences were similar in all the groups considered for the research.

"We tend to speak in this higher pitch, high variability, like, 'Ohh, heeelloo, you're a baaybee!'" said lead author Courtney Hilton, a psychologist at Yale University's Haskins Laboratories.

Co-author Cody Moser, a graduate student of cognitive science at the University of California, Merced, added, "When people tend to produce lullabies or tend to talk to their infants, they tend to do so in the same way."

In one of the most extensive studies of its kind, more than 40 scientists gathered and analyzed 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents across six continents. The voice was recorded in 18 languages from diverse communities, from hunter-gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing. The samples were taken from places that included rural-urban, isolated-cosmopolitan areas and people who were internet savvy and off the grid.

The findings imply that baby talk and baby songs are independent of cultural and social influences.

Researchers found that the sounds used while speaking parentese differed in 11 ways from adult talk around the world. For instance, some obvious differences include the baby talk pitch being higher than adult talk and the baby song being smoother than an adult song.

To further test whether people are subconsciously aware of these differences, the researchers created a game — "Who's Listening?" It was played online by more than 50,000 people speaking 199 languages from 187 countries. Participants were asked to categorize whether a song or a passage of speech that they heard was being addressed to a baby or an adult.

Despite being unfamiliar with the language and culture of the person making those sounds, participants were able to correctly categorize the voice recordings with 70% accuracy, researchers said.