[Linganth] Is "motherese" universal?

[samuels at anthro.umass.edu]

I, too, had a chance to read Falk's article. I have no egocentric data of my
own to add to Harriet's insights. But I did find it interesting that Falk's
inspiration for her theory was her own experience of wanting to speak
motherese whenever she picks a baby up, yet her theory is that motherese
developed because caretakers were putting their babies down.

To her credit, Falk sees language as having originated in forms of social
interaction, not individual brains; she has a view of language that extends
beyond lexicon and syntax; and she gives the credit for the invention of
language to children and not adults.

The universality of motherese strikes me as immaterial to Falk's theory,
actually. Motherese doesn't have to be universal in order for us to imagine
that our hominin ancestors interacted with their infants in ways that were
different from the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos, ways that derived
from upright, furless women giving birth to helpless infants (although she
seems to assume that our hominin ancestors had maturation rates similar to
homo sapiens). Falk wants the supposed universality of motherese (and in
Falk's view its prelinguistic, pedagogical features) to support a claim of an
underlying genetic-adaptive basis for the whole thing. But the presence of
motherese today, even if it were universal, wouldn't necessarily mean that
motherese was the driving force of evolution.

More important, I think, is that Falk's theory posits a sort of blank stage
during which our upright ancestors were unable to fashion slings for their
infants. Her justification for this, as I understand it, is that my cousin
Susan, who grew up in an apartment in Queens, wouldn't be able to make one out
of the materials in Flushing Meadows. (To answer another question that was
raised, Falk knows that contemporary caretakers around the world use slings to
carry their infants and keep their hands free.)

My $.02....

David