According to a new research carried out by researchers at McGill University and UQAM, infants are more interested in listening to their counterparts instead of adults – an important finding from the scientific perspective as they believe this attraction to infant speech sounds could be one of the triggers that helps kick start and support the crucial processes involved in learning how to talk.
For their study, researchers repeatedly played vowel sounds that mimicked either those made by an adult woman or those made by a baby. The sounds were created using a special synthesis tool. Researchers measured how long each sound held the infants’ attention and based on their findings, they reveal that babies have a clear preference for the sounds that mimicked the infant.
According to researchers, infants, on average, listened to the infant vowels almost forty-percent longer than the adult woman vowels. Researchers say that this is not a preference for a familiar sound because the babies who were part of the experiment were not yet babbling themselves, so the infant-like vowel sounds that they heard were not yet part of their everyday listening experience.
Some babies smiled or moved their mouths or did both when they listened to the infant-like sounds. They seemed to recognize that this was a sound that they could try to make themselves, even though they probably had never heard anything like it before.
“Perhaps, when we use a high, infant-like voice pitch to speak to our babies, we are actually preparing them to perceive their own voice,” suggests Prof. Linda Polka, of McGill’s School of Communication Disorders, and the senior author on the study.
“As adults, we use language to communicate. But when a young infant starts to make speech sounds, it often has more to do with exploring than with communicating … in fact babies typically vocalize when they are alone, without any interaction or eye contact with others,” says Prof. Polka. “That’s because to learn how to speak babies need to spend lots of time moving their mouths and vocal cords to understand the kind of sounds they can make themselves. They need, quite literally, to ’find their own voice‘.”
This study brings researchers closer to an understanding of the complex interplay between speech perception and speech production in young infants.
The research has been published in Developmental Science.
