For 10 years, Fernald and her colleagues and students have traveled worldwide to record mothers interacting with their babies, bringing the tapes back to Stanford for detailed acoustical and linguistic analysis.
She has found that mothers of all nations address their babies with universal melodies: short, sharp staccato for warning (“Nein! Nein!”); rising and then falling pitch for praise (“BRA- vo!”); a long, smooth, low frequency for comfort (“Oooh, pobrecito!”), and a high, rising melody for calling attention to objects (“Where’s the buzz-a-BEE?”).
The song remains the same for mothers speaking in emotionally expressive cultures, such as Italian, and in cultures known for emotional reserve, such as Japanese, Fernald said. It applies as much to languages like English, which stresses words for emphasis, as it does to tonal languages like Mandarin, where rising vocal pitch may alter a word’s meaning.
Source: Mothers’ melodies teach babies lyrics of language
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