THURSDAY, May 23, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- People make goo-goo talk to their babies and pets, but are they really speaking the same language to their daughter as they are to their dachshund?
Not exactly, a new study has found. Australian researchers have learned that women coo at their infants and pets with a slight but important difference -- highly drawn-out vowels to the babies but not to the animals. That might be a learning cue to help newborns pick up language, they say.
"Infants 'teach' us to speak in this way, and we all are very good at picking up the linguistic, social and emotional needs of our audience," says Denis Burnham, a researcher at the University of Western Sydney and lead author of the study. "We have no direct evidence as we cannot have a control group where infants do not get this input, as everyone does it. But we think it helps the child to understand the phonetic specifics of the particular language around them."
The findings appear in tomorrow's issue of Science.
Burnham's group gave tape recorders to a dozen women, and told them to record play sessions with their 6-month-old infants and their pets (in this case, dogs or cats). To elicit stylized speech, the researchers gave the women three toys -- a sheep, a shark and a shoe -- as props. They volunteers were also told to record their conversations with adults.
Not surprisingly, the women spoke in much higher pitches to their babies and pets than they did to their peers. They also took on a more emotionally rich affect -- where rhythm and intonation are clear but words are warped -- with children and animals than with adults, though this effect was most pronounced when speaking to infants.
All that might make it seem as if people speak to their children and pets the same way, and with the same intention. However, the recordings revealed the women exaggerated their vowels when talking to their babies but not when playing with their pets or addressing adults.
That, Burnham's group argued, is evidence that drawn-out vowel sounds are not simply verbal bunting but a teaching device: "Speakers intuitively perceive the emotional and linguistic needs of their audience, and automatically adjust their mix of speech components accordingly," they wrote.
Although the researchers didn't study fathers, Burnham says there's no reason to think men wouldn't employ a similar verbal curriculum. "It's very interesting that we do this in such a precise, fine-grained way," he adds.
James L. Morgan, an infant language expert at Brown University, calls the latest findings "cute," but says they weren't especially interesting scientifically.
While it's clear that parents, and especially those in America, drag out their vowels when talking to babies, "whether that is actually helpful for kids necessarily we don't know."
What's probably more important in teaching children language, Morgan says, "is using fairly short sentences spoken somewhat slowly. All of the exaggeration is important in engaging the infant's attention."
What To Do
For more on child development, try Tufts University or the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
