Jacob Lund/Alamy
Why do we speak to babies and pets in cute, silly voices, as opposed to our normal speaking voice? (continued)
Dr Jill MacKay
University of Edinburgh, UK
“Motherese” is the cutesy language we use around preverbal infants. It serves important roles in language development and emotional coregulation. But why do we use it with animals?
Domestication favours juvenile characteristics in animals, a phenomenon called neotenisation. The instinctive and cultural processes that teach us to speak motherese can spill over to these cute animals with their baby-like large eyes and faces. Many pets, such as dogs, are calmed by their owner talking to them, showing that emotional coregulation with motherese may be present for dogs.
But surely they aren’t learning language from this kind of talk? In the past few years, there has been a spate of pets online using augmented and assisted communication devices or talking buttons. Could motherese promote language development in pets too? Check back in a few years!
Professor Usha Goswami
University of Cambridge, UK
Although the cute voices people use when speaking to babies and pets sound similar, acoustic analyses show they are quite different. We speak to our pets in a cute voice (“doggerel”) to convey our emotions. We speak to our babies in what is technically known as infant-directed speech (IDS) to teach them language.
It is actually difficult not to use IDS when an infant is making eye contact with you, and this seems to have a biological purpose. This sing-song form of speech enhances key rhythmic patterns that the brain uses to build a language processing system. Fluctuations in speech energy, perceived as variability in loudness, create the natural rhythmic patterning that we call speech prosody, which is the hidden structural glue that binds individual speech sounds into recognisable words.
The brain encodes this patterning using rhythmic “brainwaves” that occur naturally at different speeds. IDS enhances key aspects of this structural glue in a similar way in all languages, providing consistent acoustic landmarks for the learning brain.
The acoustic structure of IDS matches English nursery rhymes, which are often perfect metrical poems. IDS unconsciously presents the acoustic statistics required for the brain to learn language in an optimal format.
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