h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Inspired by the why do we scream question, I've wondered why adults are prone to make silly oochy-coochy noises over babies and cute small animals.

Is there some legitimate anthropological function to gibbering like a tit?

@ the thread title. As for the question, I can think of all sorts of weird and wacky suggestions, but nothing plausible.

Being a recovering ooozawiddub, I think it's simply because the babies love it. Reciting a joke from the latest Ricky Gervais show to them doesn't seem to go down so well with them. When you start pulling faces and making strange noises however you have a captive audience.

Pulling faces and making noises is the important thing. You could be saying "Who's a lovely little Pythagorean then. Who just knows that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, eh?!...eh?!"

As long as you are fairly close (18 inches/45cm), smiling and speaking in a sing-song voice you will get a positive reaction.

turvy

PS Of course when they are 7 you will be told to stop being weird.

There is some study into this, not surprisingly.
Of interest here is that babies the world over make approximately the same nonsense sounds as they learn language and at approximately the same age.

The key thing, as I recall, about the nonsense we gibber at the poor little things is that it is a) repetative and b) made up of very simple sounds. The idea is that it is simpler and easier for a developing brain to process and attempt to copy the 'ooousabibibibiby' than 'good morning my fine fellow and how are we today?'. this helps in the early stages of the baby learning to control it's vocal centres and aural centres and to integrate the them to enable it to copy and learn/develop language skills.

Very interesting, thank you Ictoan.

Love the title

... only thing I have to add is that the gibbersih is usually a few octaves higher than your usual tone, simply because the infant (for reasons best known to itself responds to the higher female tones in the early stages of life... which makes it all the more entertaining when it is the usually gruff great-uncle Joseph babling incoherently to the latest addition to the family.

Now what I want to know is *what* is with the disturbing head bobbing that accompanies the dulcet tones? Watching an adult male nearly head butt an infant in the guise of baby-play is truly alarming at the best of times

Nix the smileys, please

A few octaves higher? I'd hope not Wilma, that would bring all the neighbourhood dogs over.

Incidentally, the syllables you learn the sound of as a baby are the ones you're stuck with for life. One reason why the Japanese/Chinese struggle with the English l/r sound (as in, rice or ladle) is that it doesn't exist in their language, so they're never exposed to it at that formative time. There are ones in Chinese and Japanese that the English can't get for the same reason too, but I can't remember those .

My Chinese teacher pronounced 'usually' rather like 'yearly'. As for Chinese sounds the English can't get, I find the hardest bit is the tone. In Mandarin there are only five (including a neutral one) and that's hard enough for me. I find it's like trying to sing - it sounds great in your head but then you come out with it and it's terrible. So yes, the sounds are just unfamiliar.

Sounds similar to the way I talk to my cats sometimes - they love it!

az

My closest peer at work is originally from China, and still hasn't mastered the unique English consonants. And... interestingly enough... they're the same consonants that are still challenging for my 2 year-old.

I'm told there are as many nerves going from the brain to the ear as there are from the ear to the brain. The brain actually tells the ear what to listen for. And the coochy-cooch babytalk is important in training the ear. What I read mentioned on vowel distinctions, but I'm sure it's also important for consonants.

TRiG.

Please excuse the doubt, but "The brain actually tells the ear what to listen for" sounds a bit odd to me.

The ear, and the sensory receptors in it just detect sounds. Or vibration. However, it is true that there is unconscious processing of the signal along its route and in the brain. So the brain, and the nervous system, do select what is of interest. But I wouldn;t say it was the brain telling the ear what to listen for.

While I'm sure there are a hundred studies out there backing up the theory, I'm just not buying that there's any particular educative value to nonsense baby talk. I suppose if you never talk to the kid in any other way, it's learning *something.* If you're going to teach them what to listen for, shouldn't you be using sounds that actually have real-life application? Speaking actual words would be a lot more educational.

We make nonsense noises because being over-the-top silly is something babies respond to, which makes us and them happy. I don't think it's anything more complicated than that. Now, if you tickle their tummy and say "bippityboppityboo," they learn to associate that sound with tickling on their tummy. If, instead, you say, in that same annoying, high-pitched voice we all use with babies, "I'm going to tickle your tummy!", the baby starts associating "tickle" and "tummy" with what's going on, as well as a basic pattern-match for sentence construction.

For some reason I can talk complete nonsense to the cats, but not to the kids.

As a result, my 11-year-old's teacher told me just last week what an advanced vocabulary he has.

I don't talk gibberish to the baby either, so I guess in another 10 years we'll find out if the first one was a fluke or not

It seems to me that avoiding baby-talk has been a recent trend in parenting, though I don't know if there's any study or parenting book that started the trend. It just seemed like a good idea to me. But for all the scientific value anecdotal evidence has (none), my six year-old niece was told she has an 8th-grade reading level, and I have a 28 month-old daughter who recognizes colors, shapes (and even a few letters), animals, can tell you where to find her toys, makes her own selections for food and drink (except when overruled), and displays an understanding of concepts that should be quite above her.

For instance, last weekend she wanted to paint (she has a little easel we set up for her in the kitchen with a couple small cups of washable paint), but she was told she couldn't because it was nearly nap time. My wife explained she could paint after she woke up from her nap. The kid dropped the subject and found other amusements, ten minutes went by, she was put in bed for a nap, made her various requests and played with toys for a while in bed, then went to sleep, without another mention of painting. She woke up, announced it to the house, my wife went in to get her, my daughter saw her come in, and said: "Paint."

Apropos of nothing, I suppose, but you gave me a platform to brag, and I couldn't pass it up.

I think that the point is (I'm simply regurgitating half-remembered stuff I read years ago) that the nonsense talk emphasises the vowel distinctions which are important in the local language. The infant will thus know what sounds to latch onto when interpreting speech, and which sound distinctions are unimportant.

TRiG.

Speaking of trends in parenting: http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-10,GGLG:en&q=baby+sign