I thought the universal part was the tone and cadence people use when talking to small children, and not the actual words or grammar changes.
It’s why you can listen to a recording of a language you don’t know and tell if they’re talking to a baby, but there are also cultures that essentially don’t talk to them at all until they have language.
I just wonder if it’s true. It’s certainly true for many indo-european languages, but I wonder if there’s been a typological study with a representative sample of languages done for it. I’m not sure I buy it being a language univeral.
I know I’ve read a handful of things roughly a long these line, that basically it’s probably not universal that humans simplify language for infants, but that we likely do shift how we vocalize to them.
Seems like a reasonably plausible hypothesis to me.
Is it really universal though? I don’t recall that from my linguistics masters at all, in fact I think I recall pretty much the opposite…
I thought the universal part was the tone and cadence people use when talking to small children, and not the actual words or grammar changes.
It’s why you can listen to a recording of a language you don’t know and tell if they’re talking to a baby, but there are also cultures that essentially don’t talk to them at all until they have language.
I just wonder if it’s true. It’s certainly true for many indo-european languages, but I wonder if there’s been a typological study with a representative sample of languages done for it. I’m not sure I buy it being a language univeral.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31114-4?xid=PS_smithsonian
I know I’ve read a handful of things roughly a long these line, that basically it’s probably not universal that humans simplify language for infants, but that we likely do shift how we vocalize to them.
Seems like a reasonably plausible hypothesis to me.