‘Parentese’ is truly a lingua franca, finds global study

We’ve all seen it, we’ve all cringed at it, we’ve all done it: talked to a baby like it was, you know, a baby. “Ooo, hellooooo baby!” you say, your voice lilting. Baby is baffled by unintelligible warble, but “baby so cuuuuuute!”
Regardless of whether it helps to know it, researchers recently determined that this sing-songy baby talk — more technically known as “parentese” — seems to be nearly universal to humans around the world. In the most wide-ranging study of its kind, over 40 scientists helped to gather and analyse 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents on six continents, in 18 languages from diverse communities: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, internet savvy and off the grid, from hunter gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing.
The results, published recently in Nature Human Behaviour journal, showed that in every one of these cultures, the way parents spoke to their infants differed from the way they communicated with adults — and that those differences were similar from group to group.
“We tend to speak in this higher pitch, high variability, like, ‘Ohh, heeelloo, you’re a baaybee!’” said Courtney Hilton, apsychologist and a principal author of the study.
In the study, the sounds of parentese were found to differ in 11 ways from adult talk around the world. To test whether people have an innate awareness of these differences, the researchers created a game — Who’s Listening? — that was played online by over 50,000 people speaking 199 languages from 187 countries. Participants were asked to determine whether a song or a passage of speech was being addressed to a baby or an adult.
The researchers found that listeners were able to tell with about 70% accuracy when the sounds were aimed at babies, even when they were unfamiliar with the language and culture of the person making them. “The style was different, but the vibe of it felt the same,” said Caitlyn Placek, an anthropologist who helped to collect recordings from the Jenu Kuruba, a tribe in India.