Baby Talk

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantham. There's a video on YouTube you might have seen. It has nearly two hundred million views. In this video, a pair of twin brothers are standing in a kitchen having a little chat.

I find babies are so impressive we can't really ask them what they're thinking. We have to come up with clever ways of figuring out what's going on in their little brains.

We'll meet some of the researchers trying to decipher the behavior of babies.

Oh, oh you oh that's a ball. Yep, you're right.

Do babies understand us when we're talking to them?

That's a ball, you tried to say ball, that's great.

And how babies communicate even if they don't have words. The language of babies this week on Hidden Brain.

Hi, I'm Laura Srelly.

When Laura was in college, she spent her summer vacations back home in Sudbury, Ontario.

Like five hours north of Toronto.

And she worked at the magical note. A daycare centre.

It was a a large center that had different age groups. So there was like a baby room and a toddler room, preschoolers, school age children. Probably about a hundred children total. But uh my favorite room w was the toddler room for sure.

Laura's job was to help the teachers at the center engage with the kids.

Music was an essential tool.

would sing. Old MacDonalds.

But as soon as we started it seemed to be the trick to convince them that yes, they were willing to put their toys away.

One little kid who I had a good connection with And she really wanted to go down the slide you could tell, so I helped her up the little stairs and I caught her. And all the rest of the toddlers in this playground just looked over and saw her and looked at each other and then ran over to the slide and formed a cute little lineup waiting their turn for me to help them down.

Laura's days at the magical nook are now over. After graduating college, she went on to earn her PhD in psychology, neuroscience, and behavior. She's now a postdoc at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and her work focuses on early childhood development. With years of knowledge now under her belt, she looks back on that moment at the slide and sees it as a form of communication.

you know, in order for kids to look around and and see what their peers are doing and to understand the goals that are uh embedded in those activities and to and to then realize that they need to follow the social construct of of lining up. It seems like a super simple thing, but there's a lot of understanding about themselves, about other people, about goals and activities that they they need to really uh completely understand in order for that to happen.

Laura says actions like standing in line for the slide can be categorized as pro-social behaviors. They're actions we take to help others and to benefit the group. She decided to study what she'd seen on the playground more systematically. She invited a bunch of parents to bring their toddlers into the lab.

specifically testing fourteen month old babies. So they're you know, they're walking, they're not quite talking.

These 14-month-olds said bye-bye to mommy and daddy and then were strapped into front-facing baby carriers worn by assistants in the study. The researchers turned on some music.

Usually it was twist and shout playing in the back.

And the person carrying the baby began to bounce.

It was like

So we would bounce them down on one beat and up on the other, down and up sort of thing.

So, if you're this baby, you're strapped onto someone's chest, you can't see their face, instead, you're looking in front of you. Add another assistant.

the person facing the baby would either move and synchrony with how they were being bounced, so they were bouncing together, or they would move either too quickly or too slowly so that their movements weren't aligned with what the baby was experiencing.

After about two and a half minutes, the bounce And the baby was removed from the carrier.

And then this person who had faced them and moved either in or out of sync with them would perform some little simple social games with them. So she would do things like draw pictures with markers or throw paper balls in a bucket.

Every now and then the assistant who had faced the baby would drop a marker or paperball and then pretend like the object was out of reach.

So she would reach pathetically for them for about thirty seconds and we look to see what the babies did in this really weird situation where this person they just net met needs help, but isn't really asking for help and doesn't really seem to be able to achieve their goal on their own.

Laura measured how many babies would pick up and hand back the object.

And looked at whether the babies who we bounced in sync with helped at a different rate than the babies we bounced out of sync with.

She found that babies who felt that they were bouncing in sync with a dance partner were more likely to help that partner pick up an object when it was out of reach. It was remarkable.

So they would help on over half of the trials if we moved in sync with them. Whereas if we moved out of sync with them they would ha help on only less than a third of the trials.

You've likely experienced the same drive if you've ever moved in sync with someone else, maybe on a sports team in school or in marching band, or maybe like Laura, as a dancer. Guest be our.

This song was a soundtrack of Laura's last recital in high school, where she dressed up as Mrs. Potts for a performance of Beauty and the Beast.

There were many numbers in the in the performance, but in the be our guest performance, everyone comes together, all the little uh kitchen utensils and everything, and uh we do have to really synchronize at certain parts of the dance. Um and so when you're experiencing that, you really feel like you're part of this bigger group and I mean you're focusing on the task at hand, you know.

Laura's fellow dancers remain some of her closest friends to this day.

I'm gonna be the M C at one of their weddings in September. So yeah, we uh we've definitely stayed very close.

Music and dance create bonds because as Laura says, synchronous movement is a language of its own. This unspoken language can guide behavior, even though many of us are not familiar with its syntax and vocabulary.

I think music is providing a really interesting context where a lot of social cues are happening. So uh when we're moving with other people, when we're doing familiar things and singing familiar songs, these are actually cueing us, babies and adults. to think about the relationships that we have with these people.

we think about teaching our kids to be pro social and to to be good citizens, but uh they're already attending to this information from a really early age.

The toddler experiment also shows that kids who can't speak are still hungry to communicate. When a small child reaches out to pick up a marker or a paperball, she may be saying, I like you. I want to help you. Let's be friends.

I find babies are so impressive, we can't really ask them what they're thinking. We have to come up with clever ways of figuring out what's going on in their little brains and everybody ov underestimates them.

Music and dance aren't the only ways adults and small kids communicate with one another. There's another language that actually sounds a lot like language.

Rachel Albert.

I am an assistant professor of psychology at Lebanon Valley College in Anvil, Pennsylvania.

She studies infant language development. Those quote unquote traditional views on babbling?

When babies babble, um, they're indicating that they're either um in a heightened state of arousal or by actually babbling they're increasing their arousal level. and putting themselves in kind of this optimal state of of being ready to learn. over and above than if they were just quietly looking at an object.

Rachel says Babbles have a certain je ne sais quoi.

Bonjour tout et tous, je m'appelle Madame Macron.

When she hears a baby babble, she's taken back to high school French classes.

And I had one of those immersive French teachers who would only speak French in the classroom. And so it was really like being dropped into a a non-native environment where you have to kind of figure things out. I vividly remember that she would come into the classroom and she would um start talking and class would kind of have blank stares of panic um as she would go and so she'd start slowing down her speed. And pointing and labeling particular objects in the room.

Vousette assez? О бюро.

So she would in French be kind of pointing and saying, you know, are you sitting in a desk?

Regardez le bureau.

Here's a death. And kind of repeating those key vocabulary words until we started to figure out, oh okay, this is the word for death. And I thought, well, this must be somewhat similar to what a baby experiences, right? Where there's all this conversation going around.

Blah blah blah.

Um they start to become active communication partners and trying to engage in that world. But how do they make sense

Parents often see themselves as the know-it-all French teacher and the babbling baby as the clumsy student. Rachel says this framework is the one that's mostly used in studying infant language development.

But the baby is ha playing as much of a role in this interaction as the mom. By changing the way that they babble and what they're looking at, might actually be. changing their opportunities for learning because they're changing what the parents say.

There's a word to describe a back-and-forth exchange where the thing that one person says affects what another person says. This feedback loop of communication and learning is what we call language.

Babies make as many as a thousand vocalizations every day. On average, parents respond to about 60% of these babbles.

Even just silently responding, if the mom just acknowledges the infant's vocalization with a touch, leans in, smiles, and touches the baby, the infant will immediately within the span of just ten minutes. start to produce more speech-like vocalizations. So that just that nonverbal feedback, that acknowledgement of the baby's vocalization, changes in the moment how they're battling.

Rachel says that when babies are babbling, they are more receptive to new information. Parents can take advantage of this by having conversations with their baby. And one rule of being a good conversationalist Stay attentive to what your partner is saying.

So parents that are um just talking constantly about irrelevant things that aren't what their child's looking at. For example, if a baby's looking at a ball and I'm talking about this this cup over here that I'm playing with, well, you're actually providing mismatching communication, uh, mismatching information for them. That's going to make it harder to learn.

Rachel says if you listen closely, babbling often falls into four distinct categories. They have different sounds and they elicit different responses. The first type is called QR VRV.

QR V is the m the least mature infant vocalization, so it sounds for quasi resonant vocalization. And so it's those really kinda um nasal, creaky eh kind of sounds that a lot of times parents interpret almost as fussing.

The second type is called I FRV.

So that's a fully resonant vowel and um around three or four months the baby's vocal tract opens up and then they're able to produce those more open um kind of adult like sounding vowels that kind of have those O's or Ah quality. Um and so parents recognize those as more speechlike than those first creaky nasalized vowels. And so they're more likely to respond to those.

The third is called MSFR.

So that's a marginal syllable and babies will start around six or so months m throwing consonants into the mix. So you can hear in that sound there's kind of a DJ kind of z sound. But it's it's a slow drawn out transition between when the consonant stops and when the vowel begins.

And the pinnacle the PS de resistance, if you will.

So that's what's called a canonical syllable. And um those are those nice babas and dadas that parents naturally associate with babbling. And so babies start regularly producing those, um, pretty frequently around nine months.

Parents react very strongly to to these canonical syllables. Um they hear them as the most speech like. they tend to often interpret them as approximations of words. So, you know, in that example, if a baby was holding a ball, um, a mom would be very likely to respond, Oh, oh you oh, that's a ball. Yep, you're right, that's a ball. You tried to say ball, that's great.

To Rachel, these different vocalizations are endlessly fascinating. Now that she knows how to teleport the QRVs from the FRVs and the MSFRs from the canonical syllables, she simply can't stop herself.

On my wedding day, I remember very distinctly I was in graduate school at the time and knee deep in coding this all the time, spending hours listening to these different sounds. and I remember being up at the front of the church about to say my vows and hearing some babies out in the audience babble and kind of immediately coding it and going, Oh, that was a marginal syllable

You don't have to memorize all the jargon to take away something valuable from the research. Just knowing that when babies are babbling, they're ready to learn, that can be a useful takeaway for everyone.

we discuss two final elements of baby language. One is going to make you very happy.

That's something you don't want to hear. As you're saying, your wedding vows.

A warning. If you're driving or listening to the story as you're cooking, you're about to hear something very distracting. This is Katrina Dowdner of Sunnyvale, California. It's dinner time. She's throwing a tantrum because she wants to sit at the head of the table. Problem is, the table's round. There is no head.

When she was in the midst of a tantrum, she'd pick something that she knew was completely unreasonable. I don't want my feet. Take my feet off. I don't want my feet. I don't want my feet.

That's Katrina's mom, Noemi. She says three-year-old Katrina used to throw tantrums all the time.

I once teased her w which is it turned out to be a big mistake, but I once said, Well, okay, let's go get some scissors and take care of your feet.

Uh my uh curiosity was focused on what are the elements of the tantrums of you know, the snips and snails and puppy dog tails or what?

This is my

It's Mike Podigao. I am currently an associate professor in program and occupational therapy at University of Minnesota.

Mike was inspired to study tantrums after witnessing his own daughter's operatic meltdowns.

Among the things that I learned from that was that there was a sequence in which various behaviors appeared, various behaviors which uh of which tantrums are composed.

Just like Rachel Albert did with babbling, Mike picked out a rhythm in the cacophony of his daughter's tantrum. To prove his point, he teamed up with a colleague.

James Green.

He's a psychologist at the University of Connecticut.

developed a onesie that um toddlers can wear that has a high quality wireless microphone sewn into it. Parents put this onesie on the child and uh press a go button on the equipment.

And then they waited for a meltdown. James and Mike recorded more than a hundred of them, and what they found confirmed their hypothesis.

There are two major emotional I I think of them as emotional behavioral components of tantrums.

The first is anger.

Hitting, kicking, screaming, throwing things, pushing and pulling.

And the other component is distress.

whining, crying, throwing the self down, that is dropping to the floor. And comfort seeking.

Don't confuse these components with stages. Mike says the behaviors occur simultaneously. The distress is more consistent.

throughout the tantrum, from its beginning to its end.

The anger punctuates the tantrum. It provides the dramatic spike. and it also tapers toward the end.

The uh in in every case the anger terminates before the distress.

Mike says there's a reason that most tantrums end with a distress call.

Because the distress, sadness, tends to elicit comfort giving. And so it would make sense from an evolutionary perspective. the anger which is disruptive is smoothed over by the distress component which then Other things equal will call for parent comforting the child.

Let's go back to Katrina Daudner, a three-year-old maestra who's throwing a fit because she can't sit at the head of the family's circular dining table. Dad tries to reason with her. You wanna sit you know what? It's at the scatter corner. Because it's round. James Green says that he's fallen into the same trap before.

When children are at the peak of anger and they're screaming and they're kicking, probably asking questions um might prolong that period of anger.

Dad decides to intervene. I'm gonna take you this chair for you. Now Katrina's on the floor. She grabs a stool and slams it against the wall. It seems like things are escalating, but James says it's just the opposite.

When she's thrown herself on the floor and and and thrown something or in this case knocked the chair against the wall, we're probably on the downslope. of this tantrum, she's spent a lot of energy screaming, yelling, and now uh doing these physical um behaviors.

Listen to Katrina and pay attention to how the register of her voice changes. Mike says in many cases, parents can safely ignore their child's tantrums.

And this uh approach has a has a formal name, planned ignoring, and it basically means turning your back on the child and uh and walking out of the room. because uh talking to them and telling them to stop is uh is giving them attention, albeit uh negative attention.

This works best when the child throws a tantrum to get attention or because you've said no to eating cookies at dinner. But if the child throws the tantrum in response to something you've asked them to do,

A very different approach is appropriate. And the reason for that is that what the tantrum does, it's basically a stall. It's it's a way for the child to not uh comply with uh parent uh request. And so the best approach, if it can be managed, is to get the child to comply with the request. For younger children, uh, this can be done with uh hand over hand.

Because he says it's a threat to their autonomy. And if the child still doesn't comply, maybe you can use it as an opportunity to do some research. Just like Mike.

We would walk down the street and uh I'd see a kid having a tantrum and a and uh I would say I would mutter or say out loud to my wife, Data and then to course she'd give me a sidelong look. What's wrong with you?

We've talked so far about the secret languages of dancing and babbling. We've looked at the grammar of tempo tantrums. We're getting close to the end of our story, and that brings us

Laura Cirelli, the first researcher we featured on dancing and synchronization, has also done work on the language of music with infants.

across cultures we all engage with music and we do it at such an early age. So so uh we really wanted to continue to explore this idea that one of the real real benefits and perhaps one of the underlying reasons why we invest so much time and energy and music across cultures is because of these social and emotional implications.

Remember the magic of the cleanup song that Laura talked about earlier? She and her fellow researchers wanted to closely examine the effect of music on babies and their caregivers. They asked parents to volunteer to come into the lab with their baby. thirty mothers said they would do it.

They would be in a soundproof room and babies would be sat in a little high chair and moms would sit facing them.

They were also measuring stress levels.

So we use little stickers on the bottom of the baby's foot and on the mother's fingertips. And uh we uh w what we're able to measure with this is actually their sweat gland activity.

The mothers then sang two versions of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, one version.

Twinkle, twinkle.

Wonder what you are.

The other

I wonder what you are.

Mom sang in a playful way. The both mom and baby's arousal levels stayed stable, but uh when mom sang in a soothing way.

Twinkle.

So what's this this is telling us is that lullabies are really working uh to calm not only baby but also the mother. And so this supports this idea that there's a function here.

Is is this telling us just what are is this just confirming what our intuitions are telling us or do you think it's telling us something more?

Anecdotally, I'm sure most parents would agree that lullabies soothe their babies, but usually when we're singing lullabies to our babies, we're holding them and we're rocking them and we're adding all of this really important, soothing, tactile information. So we wanted to know what the song is doing, removing all of that tactile input.

So the babies are sitting in the high chair, they're facing their mom, but they're not experiencing that holding and that rocking that typically comes along with lullabies. But I think the really interesting thing here is we usually think of when moms sing to babies, it is to change the baby's behavior. But I think it's the really new interesting thing here is considering how it's also affecting the mom.

Indeed, if there's one thing that all this research shows, is that communicating with babies is not a one way street. Parents and caregivers are shaped by what babies say and sing and scream, just as babies are hungrily soaking up information from adults. When we think about raising a human, it's natural that most of us think about the role that adults play in shaping their children.

This week's show was produced by Parth Shah and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Raina Cohen, Jenny Schmidt, Thomas Liu and Laura Quirell.

We like to end our podcast by acknowledging an unsung hero each week. This is usually a person who's working behind the scenes who helps us create the show. Since this episode is dropping right around Mother's Day, we want to recognize all the mothers of the Hidden Brain team. Watzala, Melanie, Dorothea, Bella, Toby, and Linda. Thank you for your work in raising us humans. You truly have made Hidden Brain possible.