Lisa Lechner
October 24th, 2022

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Parents and their infants: A new study shows that ‘baby talk’ has similar elements across languages. (photo: Pixabay)

A joint study by Aarhus University and the University of York shows that the way of communicating with babies and young infants, child-directed-speech (CBT), is a global phenomenon with a lot of identical aspects shared by many languages.

What is known as CBT generally includes a high-pitched, slow-paced and animated speech. 

PhD student Christopher Martin Mikkelsen Cox, who led the study, found that CBT is similar and even close to identical across 36 different languages.

When talking to infants, adults seem to use a higher pitch, more melodious phrases and slower articulation across countries.

Minor differences recognisable between languages 
Despite these common aspects across all examined languages, the researchers still discovered some differences across countries in how excessively CBT is used.

For instance, English-speaking countries scored highest when it comes to how high-pitched the baby talk is and also how clearly vowels are pronounced to infants.

Sweden and Denmark also scored high for the usage of high-pitched language, but at the same time Denmark scored low for how clearly vowels are being pronounced. 

Read more about the results here (in Danish) or here (in English). 

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