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SUNDAY SCIENCE: DID BABY TALK GIVE RISE TO LANGUAGE?  
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Carl Zimmer
June 25, 2025
The New York Times
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_ The way that human adults talk to young children is unique among
primates, a new study found. That might be one secret to our
species’ grasp of language. _

A mother and baby bonobo in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the
Democratic Republic of Congo., Franziska Wegdell/Kokolopori Bonobo
Research Project

 

If you’ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very
special experience. Indeed, it’s an all but unique one: Whereas
humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do
so, a new study
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“It’s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our
species,” said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of
Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and
her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of
language.

Other mammals can bark, meow, roar and hoot. But no other species can
use a set of sounds to produce words, nor build sentences with those
words to convey an infinite variety of meaning. To trace the origin of
our gift of language, researchers often study apes, our closest living
relatives.

These studies hint that some of the ingredients of language had
already evolved in the ancestors we share with living apes, which
lived millions of years ago. Chimpanzees can make dozens of distinct
calls, for example, which they can join
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communicate new things. Building meaning from smaller units is what
lets us create sentences from words.

Humans and apes are similar in another way: Their babies need time to
learn how to make sounds like adults. Scientists have done much more
research into how human infants develop language than into how wild
baby apes learn to make calls. One striking feature of humans is the
way that adults speak to young children. Baby talk — known to
scientists as infant-directed speech — often features repeated
words, an exaggerated stress on syllables and a high, singsong tone.

This distinctive pattern is very effective at grabbing the attention
of young children — even when they’re too young to understand the
meaning of the words that adults are saying. It’s possible that
children pay attention to infant-directed speech because it helps them
learn some of the basic features of language.

But the point in time at which infant-directed speech evolved has long
been a mystery, without any in-depth studies of wild apes. “There
was a huge lack of data,” said Franziska Wegdell of the University
of Zurich.

To gather that data, Dr. Wegdell traveled to the Democratic Republic
of Congo to observe bonobos, a species closely related to chimpanzees.
Each day, she found an infant bonobo to follow, and observed every
time that an adult communicated with it or with another adult in the
infant’s presence.

At the same time, Caroline Fryns, a behavioral biologist at the
University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland and an author on the study,
went to Uganda. There, she and her colleagues observed chimpanzees,
using the same methods employed by Dr. Wegdell on bonobos.

To round out their data on apes, the researchers used observations
from earlier expeditions. Dr. Fryns had made observations of
orangutans in Indonesia, while Lara Nellissen, a primatologist at the
National Museum of Natural History in Paris, had watched gorillas in
the Central African Republic.

The scientists gathered data not only on apes but also on children
from cultures across the world. Dr. Schick went to the Amazon
rainforest in Peru to do field work with an Indigenous group known as
the Shipibo-Conibo. She filmed a child each day, noting each time an
adult spoke to him or her. The researchers also analyzed similar
observations made by other scientists in New Guinea, Nepal and the
Swiss Alps.

The researchers discovered a stark difference between humans and apes:
Young apes hardly ever heard infant-directed communication from the
adult apes around them. Even among chimpanzees, which chatter to one
another on a regular basis, the adults might call just once to an
infant over the course of an entire day. On other days, the young
chimps received no communication at all, not even from their mothers.

Human children have a profoundly different experience with language,
the researchers found. In every culture, children were spoken to by
adults many times a day — every few minutes, in some cases. The rate
that children heard infant-directed communication was 69 times as high
as what Dr. Fryns observed among chimpanzees, and 399 times as high as
what Dr. Wegdell observed among bonobos.

“We can’t help ourselves, basically,” said Simon Townsend, a
comparative psychologist at the University of Zurich and an author of
the study.

The researchers speculated that young apes learned how to make calls
by listening to adults call to one another. That was enough training
to instill a relatively simple system of sounds. But when early humans
began gaining a complex language, children needed more help. Talking
to them a lot even before they could speak may have enabled them to
master the spoken word.

“Children had an easier way into this more and more complex
system,” Dr. Schick said.

Asif Ghazanfar, a neuroscientist at Princeton University who was not
involved in the study, speculated that human babies gained the
opportunity to learn from infant-directed speech. Human babies undergo
a much longer period of brain development than baby apes do, leaving
them helpless for longer.

“Not only are human brains therefore more plastic early in postnatal
life, but they require much more caregiver attention for a much longer
period of time,” Dr. Ghazanfar said. That close contact with
caregivers could provide more time for infant-directed speech.

Marina Kalashnikova, a linguist at the Basque Center on Cognition,
Brain and Language in Spain, praised the study as a comprehensive
analysis. But she also noted that the youngest child in the study was
11 months old, while most were between the ages of 2 and 4. “I think
that the age of the children may have influenced both how adults speak
to them and also how much,” Dr. Kalashnikova said.

It’s possible that the patterns the scientists observed in humans
are different for babies in the first few months of life, when they
are just hearing human speech for the first time. But Dr. Kalashnikova
noted that observing newborns would be especially hard. “While
challenging, these data would be truly valuable for achieving the main
aim of this work,” she said.

Dr. Fryn said that she and her colleagues were especially intrigued to
find that apes communicated directly to their infants, even if they
only did so rarely. The earliest roots of infant-directed speech might
be hiding in those calls. But it will take more research to pin down
what adult apes are saying to their infants.

“It’s not random noises, for sure,” Dr. Fryn said. “Clearly
something is happening.”

_CARL ZIMMER [[link removed]] covers news
about science for The Times and writes the Origins column
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_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES
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__

The Molecular Bond That Helps Secure Your Memories
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May 7, 2025

* Science
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* language
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* babies
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* communication
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