Hush now: Baby talk has common features across languages and societies People sing and talk to young infants in a similar fashion across a range of diverse languages, locations, and societies, a machine learning and citizen science study has found. The research claims this has implications for the evolution of language, even suggesting some common features with forms of animal communication. Led …
If this (as suggested by the abstract) indicates a general tendency in communication with infants, I wonder how culturally determined it is, given the homogenisation of behaviours resulting from mass communication. Linguistic differences may not be strictly tied to cultural trends any more.
I haven't forked out $32 for the paper, so it might be explained somewhere, but I'm wondering what the significance of this work is, particularly as the sample on which the tests were performed appears to have been all adults, not infants.
Cats do imitate humans: For instant, adult cats don't communicate by vocalizing, but they have observed it's the favorite communication method of humans, so they use voice to "talk" to us.
Some cats are even perfectionists and push this to extremely comical levels, trying to actually imitate human speech patterns. My father's cat tried it once, but us humans rolling on the floor laughing clearly offended him and he stopped after a couple attempts... Yes, he was clearly (and justifiably) offended that we were making fun at his honest effort to "speak like a human".
> They certainly think about the world around them, but not in words.
Well, after all cats were supposed to live and survive in constantly changing and quite challenging environments, all alone, so they need quite some intelligence.
They just don't stoop so low as to do stupid circus tricks like fetching their master's slippers, so the egotistic humans consider them as dumb: A "pet" is there to serve and/or amuse us, isn't it.
> People sing and talk to young infants in a similar fashion across a range of diverse languages, locations, and societies
Next they will discover that all humans are one and the same species, and that their brains initially work the same way until education shapes them to fit into their specific society and customs...
Yeah, I was thinking that it must be pretty natural the world over the realise the babies make higher frequency sounds than adults, so making similar sounds back at them is more likely what they will understand. Likewise, speaking or singing to them, the adults realise that a baby is not going to understand complex sounds and so simplify them. It's almost, but maybe not quite, a No Shit Sherlock moment. Like a lot of "common knowledge" sometimes it takes someone to go, "Hey, is this really true? Should be look into it and test for it?"
I'd really like to know why we were both downvoted.
That's why I hate downvotes. An upvote usually means "I agree" and doesn't need much explanation, but downvotes (assuming they aren't just a childish "I hate your guts" sign) must mean disagreement, and that would merit some explanation: So I'm wrong? Please be so kind to enlighten me as to why...
>Applying linear regression LASSO machine learning models – one for speech and one for song – the researchers were able to classify whether recordings were infant or adult-directed on the basis of their acoustic features.<
Is that available online somewhere?
I have a suspicion that some popular hits and a lot of german "Schlager" would end up classified as "infant-directed".
Err, ISTR a long, long time ago reading about infant language (was it Chomsky?) and learning that all infants of whatever nationality have a different grammar to adults, resulting in two-word 'sentences' such as 'allgone lettuce' being universal. So it's not terribly surprising if adults try to use similar rules to communicate with their offspring.
More likely adults are taught to communicate with children in that manner as it's all the brain can deal with at an early stage of development. With a rudimentary grammar and very restricted vocabulary there's a limit to what can be communicated. As the brain and its language centres develop more complex grammar and a greater vocabulary enable richer communication.
My first words, indeed my only words for three years, were, "Ding Dong!"
Mum must've bought me an ice-cream cone from an ice-cream van one day. And every day the van would visit I'd assume she couldn't hear it so I'd shout that at her to alert her.
I was a late talker - why bother when your favourite thing only needs two words? I was taken to a speech therapist later because I'd say words backwards, I don't know what that saw about. I can't recall the treatment but it was the '70s so probably involved drugs, shock collars and needles under my nails.
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