In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris declared that it wanted no more submissions about the origin of language, and I should probably resist the temptation myself (Betteridge’s law of headlines can be applied here as usual), but hey, it’s a Languagehat tradition — back in 2003, this post, about an “attempt to construct a coherent narrative about the prehistory of language,” began: “The NY Times has decided once again to clamber aboard their spavined, cross-eyed nag and charge creakily into battle with the windmills of linguistics.” So without further ado, I present Carl Zimmer’s NYT “Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language?” (archived):
If you’ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it’s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study reveals.
“It’s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,” said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of language. […]
Humans and apes are similar in another way: Their babies need time to learn how to make sounds like adults. Scientists have done much more research into how human infants develop language than into how wild baby apes learn to make calls. One striking feature of humans is the way that adults speak to young children. Baby talk — known to scientists as infant-directed speech — often features repeated words, an exaggerated stress on syllables and a high, singsong tone.
This distinctive pattern is very effective at grabbing the attention of young children — even when they’re too young to understand the meaning of the words that adults are saying. It’s possible that children pay attention to infant-directed speech because it helps them learn some of the basic features of language.
So they did studies on bonobos and chimpanzees:
The researchers discovered a stark difference between humans and apes: Young apes hardly ever heard infant-directed communication from the adult apes around them. Even among chimpanzees, which chatter to one another on a regular basis, the adults might call just once to an infant over the course of an entire day. On other days, the young chimps received no communication at all, not even from their mothers.
Human children have a profoundly different experience with language, the researchers found. In every culture, children were spoken to by adults many times a day — every few minutes, in some cases. The rate that children heard infant-directed communication was 69 times as high as what Dr. Fryns observed among chimpanzees, and 399 times as high as what Dr. Wegdell observed among bonobos.
“We can’t help ourselves, basically,” said Simon Townsend, a comparative psychologist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study.
The researchers speculated that young apes learned how to make calls by listening to adults call to one another. That was enough training to instill a relatively simple system of sounds. But when early humans began gaining a complex language, children needed more help. Talking to them a lot even before they could speak may have enabled them to master the spoken word.
Make of that what you will; they conclude:
Dr. Fryn said that she and her colleagues were especially intrigued to find that apes communicated directly to their infants, even if they only did so rarely. The earliest roots of infant-directed speech might be hiding in those calls. But it will take more research to pin down what adult apes are saying to their infants.
“It’s not random noises, for sure,” Dr. Fryn said. “Clearly something is happening.”
Yes, something is happening; I don’t know whether to quote Bob Dylan or Buffalo Springfield. In any case, more research is (as ever) needed. Thanks, cuchuflete!
Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants
This is, in fact, not a human universal at all. There are quite a number of cultures in which nobody thinks it sensible to speak to someone who can’t talk. Children nevertheless learn to speak fine in such societies.
Transcend the sterile dichotomy of B. Dylan v. B. Springfield! True cognoscenti of garage-rock dialectics prefer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmJw4k91i98
Plenty of adults make baby talk to puppies and (especially) kittens, but they don’t grow up into dogs and cats that speak human languages. Explain that!
While recording various apes may be well, I await a language-origin dialogue between Carl Zimmer and Ben Zimmer.
can we get the ghost of marion zimmer bradley in there? i’m sure she has (had?) Opinions on the subject; they’re probably somewhere in the Darkover books, but i know too much about her to want to read more of them than i already have.
I don’t hold with all this Zimmer framing of the subject.
A Zummoning of Zimmers.
We have come to expect so much free information from the internet that I am unreasonably irked that due to poor editing you need to skip over the first approx 50 seconds of this clip before you get to the actual “Zimmer” scene from _The Pink Panther Strikes Again_ (1976). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykt94F5X2Bc
Plenty of adults make baby talk to puppies and (especially) kittens, but they don’t grow up into dogs and cats that speak human languages. Explain that!
But as basically any “fun facts about cats” site on the internet will tell you, cats learned to meow because their two-legged servants are jabbering all the time. QED.
Laurence Welk might have offered Norma Zimmer, but, if allowed here, I actually would be interested in how language is perceived, same or not, by Carl and Ben.
(Not the place for such?)
Carl is a nephew of one of my most talented and appreciated colleagues in the genealogy field, who has quite an array of stories of mistaken Zimmer identity, when she was confused with someone else bearing the same common first and last names (including one spooky episode when an irate cheated wife hunted her, wrongly assuming that “my Zimmer” was the mistress of her wayward husband)
By transitivity anyone who has Carl as a nephew would also have Ben as a nephew, unless perhaps in the case of someone whose aunt-ness is metaphorical rather than literal.
In 1968 I was trained by infants in Cantabria/La montaña to speak Spanish to them. They rewarded me with smiles. 15 or so years later that training led me to speak Spanish to my first born, and a couple years later to his brother. They rewarded me with smiles.
Ever since, I have been in the habit of (1) speaking Spanish to infants, who seem to like the sound, as they typically smile at me, and (2) I eschew baby talk and use a normal vocal pattern.
If you were wondering how many of those infants grew up speaking Spanish with a northern Castilian accent, so far as I know it was only the ones from Spain and my sons.
We adopt cats and dogs from local shelters, as well as those that just wander into our barn for a free lunch. I speak Spanish to the dogs, and Brazilian Portuguese to the cats. I don’t discriminate between the adults and babies. None, so far, has replied in a Romance language.
I speak Spanish to the dogs, and Brazilian Portuguese to the cats.
What do you speak to horses, men, women, and god?
Zimmer is a very popular name in some parts of Austria. While traveling by car in those parts a number of years ago, I distinctly remember seeing “Zimmer” written on more than a few houses. I was wondering why people feel a need to write this particular name on their houses, because it didn’t appear that many other names where written in a similar manner, but it seemed rude to ask.
Frei is also common. I wonder if anyone has combined the two, making “Zimmer Frei”.
I speak Kusaal to dogs. They understand.
Cats do not care to understand any human language, having long since decided that we have nothing of interest to tell them.
LOL D.O.
I once dreamed that I got on a bus and sat down next to a woman who introduced herself as Marion Zimmer Bradley, so I got up and changed seats.
I distinctly remember seeing “Zimmer” written on more than a few houses
Visitors to Wales are often surprised at the number of hostelries called “Hotel Gwesty.” We are an unimaginative people.
(My English brother-in-law expressed some scepticism about the warning sign painted on many of our roads: “I mean, I’ve never actually seen any slow arafs.”)
Norwegian main roads used to be speckled with homemade roadsigns showing the direction and (surprisingly short) distance to Rom.
So what were they giving directions to?
Norw. rom “room(s)”.
My father’s standard comment was Alle veger fører til Rom.
Norw. (arch.) Rom “Rome”
D.O. “Zimmer is a very popular name in some parts of Austria” – on arriving in a mountain town in Austria for a company sales meeting some decades ago a colleague, I assume on her first visit to the country, noticed that one corporation seemed to have a stranglehold on many of the town’s businesses: Hotel Eingang, Bank Eingang and the like (and I don’t think she was joking).
This is, in fact, not a human universal at all. There are quite a number of cultures in which nobody thinks it sensible to speak to someone who can’t talk. Children nevertheless learn to speak fine in such societies.
This struck me while reading the article, and indeed the research paper itself acknowledges it in its Introduction: “there is also substantial cross-cultural variation in infants’ exposure to infant-directed communication, with no obvious effect on language learning”.
Abby Kaplan has a chapter about this in her excellent 2016 book, Women Talk More Than Men … And Other Myths about Language Explained (see Hat’s “Bookshelf: Miscellany X“), in which she shows how beliefs about the importance of babytalk are highly culture-specific (and can also feed unhelpfully into the politicized “language gap” idea in education):
Babytalk is demonstrably not necessary for child language acquisition, so I’m not convinced it played a vital role in language evolution. But I haven’t read much about cross-linguistic differences in child-directed speech, of which there’s a considerable body of research.