Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language?
If you've ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it's an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study reveals.
'It's a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,' 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 — known to scientists as infant-directed speech — 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 — even when they're too young to understand the meaning of the words that adults are saying. It's possible that children pay attention to infant-directed speech because it helps them learn some of the basic features of language.
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