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<div class="timestamp">August 28, 2007</div>
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<h1>Baby Talk Crosses Cultural Line </h1>
<div class="byline">By NICHOLAS BAKALAR</div>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>It may be that when adults talk to babies, they use a language that is universally understood.</p>
<p>Researchers made recordings of English-speaking mothers talking to babies and to adults, then played them to residents of a Shuar village in Morona Santiago Province in southeastern Ecuador. The Shuar are an indigenous group of hunter-horticulturalists who had been taught Spanish but have their own language, and the scientists wanted to see if they could understand the meaning, even without understanding any of the words, when adults talked to babies in English.
</p>
<p>The researchers recorded four utterances from each of eight English-speaking mothers, ages 21 to 51. The mothers viewed pictures of babies to provoke speech suggesting one of four categories of meaning: prohibition, approval, comfort or paying attention. They were given no script, but were asked to speak as if they were talking to their own baby, using the same phrasing and intonation. 
</p>
<p>Then the women were recorded conveying the same meanings as if speaking to an adult. The 26 Shuar young adults were successful about three-quarters of the time in determining whether an adult or a child was being addressed. With adult speech, they identified the correct meaning category 64 percent of the time, with only moderate success in identifying attention and comfort, and very little in understanding prohibition and approval.
</p>
<p>But when English-speaking adults talked to babies, the Shuar found it much easier to understand. They succeeded an average of 75 percent of the time in distinguishing the four meanings, with success rates of 78 percent in identifying attention and 86 percent in understanding prohibition. The 
<a title="Read the Abstract." href="http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01970.x"><font color="#000066">report</font></a> appears in the August issue of Psychological Science.</p>
<p>"This is the first empirical demonstration that in a nonliterate, nonindustrialized indigenous culture, people are able to recognize meaning in a language they don't speak," said Gregory A. Bryant, a co-author of the paper and an assistant professor of communications at the 
<a title="More articles about the University of California." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_california/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><font color="#000066">University of California
</font></a>, Los Angeles. "There is variability across cultures in how much people talk to babies, but when they do, they tend to sound very much alike."</p></div><br>
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