Study finds how babies and puppies help mothers to speak more

PARIS: In addition to being newborns, babies and pups have at least two features in common that help human mothers communicate more clearly when they talk.

This discovery is the product of research by an international team1 that includes Alejandrina Cristia, a CNRS Researcher at the Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique (LSCP) (CNRS/EHESS/ENS-PSL).

Scientists studied the vocal behaviour of ten mothers to better understand why mothers articulate more when speaking to infants. Participants were asked to speak to a puppy, to their six-month-old baby, and to an adult for about ten minutes.

Researchers extracted every voyel from the recordings, studied their acoustic characteristics, and measure the emotions expressed according to adults who were unaware of the context in which each vowel had been pronounced.vocal-behaviu

Surprisingly, the team found that mothers articulated better and expressed more positive emotions when speaking to their babies or to puppies.

In both situations, mothers displayed a range of positive emotions, which correlated with changes in their vocalisations. Other research shows that hyperarticulation leads to a clearer pronunciation of words and makes speech easier for infants to process.

Published in the Journal of Child Language on 1 July, these findings demonstrate that future studies on maternal speech should consider the emotional state of individuals.