Move over Mum and Dad, a new study shows that infants prefer to hear sounds from their peers; other babies.
Despite our best attempts to recreate baby coos and babbling sounds, it looks like our efforts could be in vain.
Although babies appreciate us trying, according to science, even our imitations of their vowel-like vocalisations with an identical pitch, cannot compete with infants' preference for their own acoustic vocal sounds.
The noises babies make through vibrations and sound frequencies are uniquely formed by their very small bodies.
Play dates with other babies might be something you should jot down on your calendar, as Linda Polka, a professor at McGill University explains the possible benefits the study has found on language development in babies.
"Infants' own vocalizations are quite potent; infant speech seems to capture and hold infant attention, sometimes prompting positive emotions. This may motivate infants to be vocally active and make it easier to evaluate their own vocalizations, perhaps energizing and supporting spoken language development," she said.
Even before your baby can form sounds like “ba ba ba,” the study has shown that although they will recognise the vowel-like sounds, your child is much more engaged when these sounds come from the mouths of babies.
In the experiment, five-month-old participants spent 40 percent longer listening to sounds from babies than adult making the same sounds.
This result and follow-up experiments looking into baby’s speech perception are opening doors into the world of "how infants develop their understanding of spoken language.” said Polka.
“What they bring innately and what is shaped by their experience as listeners and as 'talkers-in-training,'" she added.
Studies by Polka's team show the fondness pre-babbling babies have for their own vocal sounds.
"Access to infant speech, likely including a baby's own vocalizations, seems to have a broad and significant impact, influencing receptive, expressive and motivational aspects of speech development," Polka said.
Polka’s team conducted the study by using a synthesizer which can generate speech and vowel sounds that come from a human mouth at any age.
The baby participates were sat facing a screen displaying a checkerboard pattern, they could turn a sound on or off by looking at or away from the board.
Through this method, the researchers determined that infants responded more to vowels that sound like their own, than the simulations of an adult female.
The scientists then turned their attention to the dimension of each sound, in particular, the focus on a high voice pitch, which many of us do to grab our baby’s attention.
The findings, however, once again showed that seven-month-old infants had a strong reaction to sounds that resembled theirs in terms of the combination of high pitch and resonance.
Infants appear "tuned" to sounds produced by very small talkers just like them.
Nevertheless, the researchers did say that the findings do not mean that we should give up oohing and aahing in high voices with our little ones, as your baby will respond to these kinds of sounds.
