The Beauty of Baby Talk

The Beauty of Baby Talk

Bliss—my niece is having a baby soon, within a few weeks, and I’m swooning!  Almost three decades ago, I saw her wriggling out of my sister-in-law’s womb, it’s full circle. If I could go around the world, holding babies without parents, in need of love, cuddling and crooning, I’d sign up.  What is it about babies that brings me to such abandon? It’s the absolute 100%  innocence, the unconditional love that flows both ways. Babies are pure before they’re bruised and cut by life, before they think they’re threatened, before they’re territorial, before they build walls (literal and metaphorical) before the ills of living … before they get defenses.

I’ve heard people say they think babies are blobs who understand nothing because they’re not yet “grown” up enough. No. Far from it. At birth, they come into the world as perfect little packages of preciousness, with surprise contents: personality traits (introvert, extrovert, ambivert) and tons of other quirks. Published in ‘Frontiers in Psychiatry,’ a new study observed newborns and one month olds—the richness of data, wow! Check it out: On three indices: 1. Negative emotionality: distress/fear to environmental stressors, sadness displays. 2. Positive emotionality: smiling/laughing, high intensity pleasure, vocal responsiveness. 3. Regulation/orienting: soothability, cuddliness, low intensity pleasure. Each infant showed unique, differences of functional connectivity in cortical brain networks.

We recognize babies’ needs and match their energy. How? In the unique way we “talk” to babies, it’s nothing like how to talk to adults. We’re dramatically different when we interact with infants, to the point that if we did the same with adults, we’d be seen as weird and bonkers. What is “babytalk?” Parent to baby communication, is called “Infant Directed Speech” (IDS), first coined by Charles Ferguson in 1964 ‘Journal of American Anthropologist.’ Ferguson gives examples of infant-specific languages, e.g. “choo-choo” = train, “itty-bitty” = little, “peek-a-boo” = unique baby experience. In 1977,  ‘Journal of child Language,’ “Motherese” was used to describe these special ways of interacting with babies.  “Fatherese,” “parentese,” or “otherese” was also used. The Many Babies Consortium ‘Journal of Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science,’ reports that Baby Talk is virtually universal. In multiple countries, 3 to 15 month old babies were studied; infants responded most to IDS. It’s saying to your baby, “I’m custom-making my speech especially for you and your growing little brain!”

The ‘Journal of Human Nature’  talks about ‘The Poetics of Babytalk,’ where dyadic interactions are studied.  Analyzing 1 minute segments of babytalk with 8 infants, we see  poetic textures of the mother’s speech—metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding … all of it helps to shape and direct the baby’s attention. In the first few weeks of life, a babies respond to poetic features of language, which lays the foundation for richer, more sophisticated attributes later in life: cognitive and affective capacities.

Though we begin to “talk” to babies at birth, between one to six months, parent’s speech gets hyper-matched to the infant, e.g.  we spontaneously use highly specialized methods: our tones softer and simplified, exaggerated, vowel hyper-articulation and rhythmic heady/body movement. We’re hardwired to use undulating, higher pitch, slower speech rate, unintelligible vocabulary (shorter words), sing-song  intonations and repetitive vocalizations, we exaggerate our facial expressions, head/body movements, and laser-focus, visually track, maintaining solid eye-contact. Babies provide feedback cues, which the caregiver reciprocates, until a positive feedback loop gets established, one positively reinforcing the other. It’s a melodic dance. In fact, the entire vocal exchange has a musicality, an organic dance. For babies and their mothers, this begins the cascade of the attachment and attunement process … they feel closer to each other, tuned in, clocked together and dialed in.

The common denominator in IDS is … drum roll:  singing! Yes, singing! Let’s stretch our understanding of music: when a parent cradles their baby against their chest, the baby hears a beat—his/her mom’s or dads heartbeat! The infant is soothed by the same sound he/she heard while a fetus in the womb. This music, closeness, the proximal predictable sound.  Is lulling and comforting. The womb is a liquid-filled swooshing cave, drum-like echoic chamber. We all begin this way. We’re new to the world, and we’re ready for music, engage with musicality with our caregivers. A ton of research shows in all cultures parents sing with their babies. Babies want their moms and dads to do ‘sing-song’ with them, not talk dully monotone. We are born musical humans. Our capacity for music is in our DNA: it’s part of our genetics and biology, not just our culture. We evolved with it. In ‘Journal Enfance,’ Colwyn Trevarthen writes “we are born with a musical wisdom and appetite.”  From birth,  babies are attracted to music—it’s their first native language. ‘British Journal of Music Education’ reviews babies are hyper-sensitive to the rhythms, melodies, pitch, beats … long before they understand  meanings of  words. Babies are born ready to engage like this, to rhythms, tempo flexibility, and show positive engagement with music.  When they were tiny, barely able to speak,  I remember my niece and nephew, as soon as a Bollywood music video started, they’d shake their little bodies, gyrate and move their limbs. I was amazed. Nobody taught them to ‘dance,’ they hadn’t studied or seen it … but somehow, their bodies had a super-sense, an intuitive bodily knowing, an involuntary reflex of to ‘dance!’ They were absorbing music and moving to it in time, tempo, melody, pitch, and beat. It was as natural to them as breathing. Before my niece and nephew were toddlers dancing, they were infants clapping hands, banging objects, shaking their rattles, jumping up and down in rhythm in their playpens. Their musicality always there.

Why does this happen? Why is music ingrained in us? Why does it sit inside of us ready to come alive?  Evolutionary biology sets the stage: 500 million years ago, to survive as a species and become stronger as a collective, so we could rely on each other as a group, we needed to create, regulate, and glue our social relationships. In ‘The Singing Neanderthals,” Steven Mithen talks about the 20,000 and 5000 BCE Pre-historic hunter-gatherer and early farming communities, the role of music, e.g. celebratory group singing, mothers humming to their infants while doing chores. We must stretch our idea of music to include drumming, dancing, chanting, mantras. In ‘Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences,’  Mithen talks about the exquisite coordinated interaction, e.g.  baby and mom musically coordinate with each other—this supplies emotional soothing, social bonding. Whether it’s ninth century Gregorian chant or ‘baba black sheep,’ the wish is the same: to connect—and stay connected.

From birth, we share this goal: to connect. To this end, we have “Singese” or “Infant Directed Singing.” In ‘European Network of Music Educators and Researchers of Young Children,’ Dionyssiou talks about recordings of parents’ with their infants in the first year. By studying advanced computer graphics of musical acoustics, voice and rhythms, we see narrative patterns of typical conversations of mothers with infants in the first 6 months. Even a newborn discriminates between  different qualities of vocal or instrumental sounds, their compositions, narrative sequences,  melodies. Whoa. This is complex stuff! This is how babies learn to play games of songs with their families—the same rituals used  by our ancestors centuries ago. This is the invisible string of sound we can still hear. I stumbled onto a phenomenal article in The ‘Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.’ It mixes archeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience. It talks about music as social bonding and biological evolution, e.g. mothers carrying their infants while foraging, as a way of giving attention to their babies in a multimodal way, singing synchronizing with the rhythmic movements of walking, humming to their babies cooing, etc.

In Daniel Stern’s wondrous book ‘Interpersonal World of the Infant,’ he writes beautifully about the “vitality contours, musicality of signaling” between mom and baby. He says, ““For the baby, music comes before the lyrics.” How? When we interact with a baby, we’re a dyad with exquisite, delicate temporal sensitive matching. We “march in step.” The mother/father-infant interaction is remarkable to watch: each party takes turns taking the initiative, and the other responds in a way that positively reinforces the other,  spontaneously makes the receiver feel important. When we hold a baby, we intuitively mirror them, their mouth, movements, limbs. We echo and imitate—this is sympathetic mirroring. It’s remarkable: with  mirror neurons, how we form empathy, evoke memory from music and vice-versa, and how as Ryszard Praszkier, in Journal of  ‘Mind and Society’ writes, babies and parents look at each other, forming resonance through a complex process of  ‘tension-release.’ In ‘Journal Erudit,’ Gratier and Magnier point out that when parents reward their babies with an imitative response, they inject their infant with a sense of agency.

Yes, agency! I’m in awe. We do what comes naturally: use baby talk to focus, interact and awash love our infants. With this, we’re enabling them with purpose and power! Babies are born with a burning desire to share meaningful experience. From birth, they intend meanings—they’re  primed and programmed and motivated to coordinate and synchronize verbal timing with us. From their first breath, babies are hungry to connect.

Dr. Ranjan Patel Marriage Family Therapist 1 (650) 692-5235