{"id":30493,"date":"2025-06-25T18:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T18:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=30493"},"modified":"2025-06-25T18:26:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T18:26:08","slug":"did-baby-talk-give-rise-to-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=30493","title":{"rendered":"Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The way that human adults talk to young children is unique among primates, a new study found. That might be one secret to our species\u2019 grasp of language.<\/p>\n

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If you\u2019ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it\u2019s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study<\/a> reveals.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,\u201d said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of language.<\/p>\n

Other mammals can bark, meow, roar and hoot. But no other species can use a set of sounds to produce words, nor build sentences with those words to convey an infinite variety of meaning. To trace the origin of our gift of language, researchers often study apes, our closest living relatives.<\/p>\n

These studies hint that some of the ingredients of language had already evolved in the ancestors we share with living apes, which lived millions of years ago. Chimpanzees can make dozens of distinct calls, for example, which they can join<\/a> into pairs<\/a> to communicate new things. Building meaning from smaller units is what lets us create sentences from words.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Humans and apes are similar in another way: Their babies need time to learn how to make sounds like adults. Scientists have done much more research into how human infants develop language than into how wild baby apes learn to make calls. One striking feature of humans is the way that adults speak to young children. Baby talk \u2014 known to scientists as infant-directed speech \u2014 often features repeated words, an exaggerated stress on syllables and a high, singsong tone.<\/p>\n

This distinctive pattern is very effective at grabbing the attention of young children \u2014 even when they\u2019re too young to understand the meaning of the words that adults are saying. It\u2019s possible that children pay attention to infant-directed speech because it helps them learn some of the basic features of language.<\/p>\n

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The way that human adults talk to young children is unique among primates, a new study found. That might be one secret to our species\u2019 grasp of language.If you\u2019ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it\u2019s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study reveals.\u201cIt\u2019s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,\u201d said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of language.Other mammals can bark, meow, roar and hoot. But no other species can use a set of sounds to produce words, nor build sentences with those words to convey an infinite variety of meaning. To trace the origin of our gift of language, researchers often study apes, our closest living relatives.These studies hint that some of the ingredients of language had already evolved in the ancestors we share with living apes, which lived millions of years ago. Chimpanzees can make dozens of distinct calls, for example, which they can join into pairs to communicate new things. Building meaning from smaller units is what lets us create sentences from words.Humans and apes are similar in another way: Their babies need time to learn how to make sounds like adults. Scientists have done much more research into how human infants develop language than into how wild baby apes learn to make calls. One striking feature of humans is the way that adults speak to young children. Baby talk \u2014 known to scientists as infant-directed speech \u2014 often features repeated words, an exaggerated stress on syllables and a high, singsong tone.This distinctive pattern is very effective at grabbing the attention of young children \u2014 even when they\u2019re too young to understand the meaning of the words that adults are saying. It\u2019s possible that children pay attention to infant-directed speech because it helps them learn some of the basic features of language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30495,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30493"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30496,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30493\/revisions\/30496"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}