From China to Tanzania, from Scandinavia to Polynesia, from the Amazon to Canada: it seems that at all latitudes, people tend to change their voice in the same way when addressing children. This is reported in a study published in Nature Human Behavior, conducted by a research team made up of more than 40 scientists of different nationalities and led by Courtney B. Hilton of Harvard University in Cambridge (USA) and Cody J. Moser of the University of California, Merced (USA). The conclusions were drawn after analyzing more than 1,600 voice recordings that the researchers collected from 21 different societies spread across six continents.
Hypotheses and data analysis
In the past, it was believed that different languages favored certain combinations of sounds that were common to all others over others. The authors of this study wondered whether people from different cultures and languages used the same vocal modulations when communicating with children. When we address a child, we actually instinctively adopt a different tone of voice than we would when speaking to an adult. Several studies have shown that this stereotype has very specific functions – it encourages the child to learn the language and shapes their temperament or mood. What surprises scientists is that this happens in the same way across cultures.
To find out why this is the case, the researchers recorded the responses of 410 study participants after asking them to speak to a “sulky” child, then to an adult, and finally to imagine singing a song while addressing the child and adult again. The resulting 1,615 recordings were then analyzed using computational methods to eliminate the introduction of human error due to unconscious bias or preconceptions; 15 different types of acoustic characteristics, such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre, were examined.
The results
It turns out that the acoustic characteristics of speech and songs directed at children contain similar elements when comparing 21 different cultures to which the study participants belong. Of the 15 characteristics examined, 11 appear to be consistently distinguishable and shared. In most cases, the voice of the same participant directed at a child is characterized by a higher pitch and a generally wider range of intonations. These characteristics are commonly used by different animal species to communicate in situations of non-danger, in contrast to the low and hoarse sounds used in situations of aggression or anxiety. Therefore, the researchers suggest that there are common roots that can be found in the basic principles of bioacoustics, the science that studies the use of different forms of animal communication in different circumstances. Another distinctive feature of language directed at children is the greater clarity in the impulse used to articulate the words.
A generalization valid for all the cultures analyzed is that taken together, these elements would give a musicality to the utterances, usually addressed to children, which ultimately makes them seem like songs.
The participation of "unconscious listeners"
The researchers then included a group of randomly selected people, testing whether they were able to recognize who the sounds they were asked to hear were directed at. The experiment was conducted through “Who’s Listening?”, a platform that allows volunteers to participate in research experiments. The “unconscious listeners” – 51,056 people living in 187 different countries around the world, selected from among the participants – were able, on average, to distinguish speech directed at a child from that directed at an adult. Given the diversity of the sample and after specific analyses, the researchers concluded that this was not related to linguistic similarities between those who produced the sounds and those who listened to them (translator’s note – it doesn’t matter that the speaker speaks language A and the listener speaks language B). In other words, it seems that “unconscious listeners” were able to recognize specific features of languages typically addressed to children or adults, regardless of the content of what they were listening to, and based solely on paraverbal elements such as tone of voice. An interesting observation, the study authors write, is that there seems to be a clear trend – in terms of speech, singing is associated with child-directed communication, rather than adult-directed communication. A pattern that clearly resonates with theories that singing and music in general have a special role in children’s growth and learning.
Limitations of the study
The authors themselves acknowledge that the study has some limitations that need to be taken into account. For example, as large and diverse as the sample of participants was, it is not representative of the entire human species. Therefore, in order to generalize the conclusions, the study needs to be expanded further. In addition, the recorded vocalizations were not produced spontaneously by the participants, but at the request of the researchers, which may have influenced their characteristics. At the same time, the very fact that the recordings were made under the most standardized conditions possible would make the sample homogeneous enough to be studied in a systematic way.
Translation from Italian: Iliana Deckova
Source: https://www.galileonet.it/lingua-bambini-parlare/
© 2023 Iliana Dechkova