by
Ryan Smith
Dr. David Miall found that baby talk is full of poetic features.
February 4, 2004 - Some parents may think it is undignified or detrimental, but baby talk is essential to the full development of a baby's brain, says a researcher at the University of Alberta.
Baby talk, the universal cooing that parents do to get their infants' attention, is more important than we may have ever realized, said Dr. David Miall, professor of English at the U of A.
Baby talk helps infants to develop an understanding and appreciation of temporal arts, such as literature, music and dance, and depriving babies of the alliteration, assonance and other poetic elements inherent in baby talk could hinder their ability to produce and appreciate these arts when they grow up, said Miall. His research was published recently in the journal
Human Nature--An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective.
"There has been little research done in this area. Most evolutionary psychologists believe baby talk is simply related to a desire to develop a baby's sense of attachment and affiliation, but we think it is much more significant than that," Miall said.
Miall and his research colleague, Dr. Ellen Dissanayake, base their views according to studies they did with a software program that Miall had developed to recognize patterns in poetry. He discovered that baby talk follows the same patterns often found in the poetry that adults read.
"Baby talk is full of poetic features, such as metrics and phonetics," Miall said. "I was surprised by how systematic it is, and how it works to shape and direct attention."
He noticed, for example, that the sounds a parent makes when the baby is focusing on the parent come from the high-front part of the mouth, which indicates intimacy. Conversely, the sounds come from the low-back part of the mouth when the parent is trying to win the baby's attention.
"There is a lot of evidence to show that an infant's mind is enormously flexible and adaptive, and we feel that if a parent does not engage their baby with baby talk it would be a loss, both cognitively and emotionally, for the baby," Miall said.
He also contends that baby talk is evidence that humans' ability to produce and appreciate art is not simply a means to help the artist charm and entice sexual partners, as some evolutionary psychologists believe. Humans have adapted the means to produce and appreciate art as a way to, among other things, elevate, enrich and educate one another, and baby talk is an example of this, Miall said.
"Baby talk is an essential element of who and what we are," he added. "And it shows that literary art is not simply an ornament created for sexual selection."
Related links – internal
Dr. David Miall's U of A website:
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/ The U of A Department of English website:
http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/english/ Related link – external
Human Nature--An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective website:
http://www.archaeoworld.com/journals/humanNature/
Address of this ExpressNews article:
http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=5546
