The results, published recently in the journal Nature Human Behavior, showed that in every one of these cultures, the way parents spoke and sang to their infants differed from the way they communicated with adults — and that those differences were profoundly similar from group to group. (View Highlight)
Scientists have long argued that the sounds humans make with their babies serve a number of important developmental and evolutionary functions. As Samuel Mehr, a psychologist and director of The Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories who conceived the new study, noted, solitary human babies are “really bad at their job of staying alive.” The strange things we do with our voices when staring at a newborn not only help us survive but teach language and communication. For instance, parentese can help some infants remember words better, and it allows them to piece together sounds with mouth shapes, which gives sense to the chaos around them. Also, lullabies can soothe a crying infant, and a higher pitched voice can hold their attention better. “You can push air through your vocal tract, create these tones and rhythms, and it’s like giving the baby an analgesic,” Dr. Mehr said. (View Highlight)
cita evolución homo_sapiens bebés
An increasingly popular joke among academics holds that the study of psychology is actually the study of American college undergraduates. Because white, urban-residing researchers are overrepresented in psychology, the questions they ask and the people they include in their studies are often shaped by their culture. (View Highlight)
In the new study, the sounds of parentese were found to differ in 11 ways from adult talk and song around the world. Some of these differences might seem obvious. For instance, baby talk is higher pitched than adult talk, and baby song is smoother than adult song. But to test whether people have an innate awareness of these differences, the researchers created a game — Who’s Listening? — that was played online by more than 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 percent accuracy when the sounds were aimed at babies, even when they were totally unfamiliar with the language and culture of the person making them. “The style of the music was different, but the vibe of it, for lack of a scientific term, felt the same,” said Caitlyn Placek, an anthropologist at Ball State University who helped to collect recordings from the Jenu Kuruba, a tribe in India. “The essence is there.” (View Highlight)