Hidden Brain - Baby Talk

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Babies are speaking to us all the time, but most of us have no clue what they're saying. To researchers, though, the babbling of babies is knowable, predictable, and best of all, teachable to us non-experts. This week, we revisit our May 2018 primer on how to decipher the secret language of babies and young children.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's a video on YouTube you might have seen. It has nearly 200 million views. In this video, a pair of twin brothers are standing in a kitchen, having a little chat. These twin brothers, a diaper clad, babies. A diaper clad. Babies. Now, if this video featured 10-year-old twins or adult twins, I guarantee you it wouldn't have gone viral.

What makes this video special is that we have no clue what these babies are saying. To us non-babies, it sounds like Gobletyygook. Cute, mysterious, gobbledygook. Here at Hidden Brain, we love trying to understand the puzzles and contradictions of human behavior. But we spend most of our time talking about the older members of the human race. Today, we focus on the younger set. The much younger set. I find babies are so impressive. We can't really ask them what they're thinking.

We have to come up with clever ways of figuring out what's going on in their little brains. We'll meet some of the researchers trying to decipher the behavior of babies. Oh, oh, that's a ball? Yep, you're right. Do babies understand us when we're talking to them? That's a ball, you try to say ball, it's great. And how babies communicate even if they don't have words. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. The language of babies, this week, on Hidden Brain.

Hi, I'm Laura Sreli. When Laura was in college, she spent her summer vacations back home in Subry, Ontario. Like five hours north of Toronto. And she worked at the Magical Nook, a daycare center. It was a large center that had different age groups. So there was like a baby room and a toddler room, preschooler, school-aged children,

probably about 100 children total. But my favorite room was the toddler room for sure. Laura's job was to help the teachers of the center engage with the kids and enforce the rules. The music was an essential tool. We would sing wheels on the bass. Old McDonald's. If we didn't sing the clean up songs the preschoolers then I don't think anything would have ever gotten cleaned up. But as soon as we started it seemed to be the trick to convince them that yes, they were willing to put their toys away.

Laura regularly found herself in awe of the toddlers. One little kid who I had a good connection with, she grabbed my hand and brought me over to the little slide, and she really wanted to go down the slide, you could tell. So I helped her up the little stairs and I caught her at the bottom of the slide and all the rest of the toddlers in this playground just looked over and saw her and looked at each other and then ran over to the slide and formed a cute little line up waiting her turn for me to help them down. Laura's days at the magical knuck are now over. After graduating college, she went on to earn her PhD in Psychology, Neuroscience and Behavior.

She's now a postdoc at the University of Toronto, Mrs. Saga, and her work focuses on early childhood development. With years of knowledge now under her belt, she looks back on that moment at the slide and sees it as a form of communication. You know, in order for kids to look around and see what their peers are doing and to understand the goals that are embedded in those activities and to then realize that they need to follow the social construct

of lining up. It seems like a super simple thing, but there's a lot of understanding about themselves realize that they need to follow the social construct of lining up. It seems like a super simple thing, but there's a lot of understanding about themselves, about other people, about goals and activities that they need to really completely understand in order for that to happen. Laura says actions like standing in line for the slide can be categorized as prosocial behaviors. They're actions we take to help others and to benefit the group. She decided to study what she'd seen on the playground more systematically.

She invited a bunch of parents to bring their toddlers into the lab. We were specifically testing 14 month old babies, so they're walking, they're not quite talking. These 14 month olds said bye bye to mommy and daddy, and then was strapped into front facing baby carriers worn by assistants in the study. The researchers turned on some music. Usually it was twist and shout playing in the background. And the person carrying the baby began to bounce. It was like... So we would bounce them down on one beat enough on the other, down and up sort of thing.

So if you're this baby, you're strapped onto someone's chest. You can't see their face. Instead, you're looking in front of you at another assistant. The person facing the baby would either move in synchrony with how they were being bounced, so they were bouncing together, or they would move either too quickly or too slowly, so that their movements weren't aligned with what the baby was experiencing. After about two and a half minutes, the bouncing stopped, and the baby was removed from the carrier.

And then this person who had faced them and moved either in or out of sync with them would perform some little simple social games with them. So she would do things like job pictures with markers or throw paper balls in a bucket. Every now and then, the assistant who had faced the baby would drop a marker or paper ball and then pretend like the object was out of reach. So she would reach pathetically for them for about 30 seconds and we looked to see what the babies did in this really weird situation where this person they just met needs help, but isn't really asking for help and doesn't really seem to be able to achieve their

goal on their own. Laura measured how many babies would pick up and hand back the objects. And looked at whether the babies who were bounced in sync with helped at a different rate than the babies we bounced out of sync with. She found that babies who felt that they were bouncing in sync with a dance partner were more likely to help that partner pick up an object when it was out of reach. It was remarkable. So they would help on over half of the trials if we moved in sync with them. Whereas if we moved out of sync with them, they would help on only less than a third of the trials.

You've likely experienced the same drive if you've ever moved in sync with someone else, maybe on a sports team in school or in marching band, or maybe like Laura, as a dancer. Be out. Guest, be out guest. Put our service to the test. Or maybe like Laura as a dancer. This song was a soundtrack of Laura's last recital in high school, which you dressed up as Mrs. Parts for a performance of Beauty and the Beast. There were many numbers in the performance, but in the B.R. guest performance, everyone comes together

all the little kitchen utensils and everything. And we do have to really synchronize at certain parts of the dance. And so when you're experiencing that, you really feel like you're part of this bigger group. And I mean, you're focusing on the task at hand, doing all of these steps, but that's become quite automatic at this point, and instead you can really sort of feel the connection

with your code answers, and you start to just ignore the audience completely because you're part of this bigger thing. Come on and lift your glass, you want your own free pass to be our guest if you're stressed. Laura's fellow dancers remain some of her closest friends to this day. I'm going to be the MC at one of their weddings in September. So yeah, we've definitely

stayed very close. Music and dance create bonds because, as Laura says, synchronous movement is a language of its own. This unspoken language can guide behavior even though many of us are not familiar with its syntax and vocabulary. I think music is providing a really interesting context where a lot of social cues are happening. So when we're moving with other people, when we're doing familiar things and singing familiar songs, these are actually queuing us, babies and adults to think about the relationships that we have with these people.

We think about teaching our kids to be pro-social and to be good citizens, but they're already attending to this information from a really early age. The toddler experiment also shows that kids who can speak are still hungry to communicate. When a small child reaches out to pick up a marker or a paper ball, she may be saying, I like you. I want to help you. Let's be friends. I find babies are so impressive. We can't really ask them what they're thinking. We have to come up with clever ways of figuring out what's going on in their little brains and everybody of underestimates them. Music and dance aren't the only ways adults and small kids communicate with one another.

There's another language that actually sounds a lot like language. I like that language. The traditional way of looking at babbling, even as recently as 15, 20 years ago, was really that it was just motor practice that it had no bearing on later language. It was just something babies did to exercise their mouths. This is Rachel Albert. I'm an assistant professor of psychology at Leibniz Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. She studies infant language development. Those quote-unquote traditional views on babbling? R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r this optimal state of being ready to learn. Over and above, then if they were just quietly looking at an object.

Rachel says Babbles have a certain june c'est quoi? Bonjour tout-être tous, je m'appelle Madame Macron. When she hears a baby Babble, she's taken back to high school French class. And I had one of those immersive French teachers who would only speak French in the classroom. And so it was really like being dropped into a non-native environment where you have to kind of figure things out. I vividly remember that she would come into the classroom and she would start talking and the whole class

would kind of have like stairs of panic as she would go. And so she'd start slowing down her speech and pointing and labeling particular objects in the room. So she would in French be kind of pointing and saying, you know, are you sitting in a desk? Look at the desk. Here's a desk. And kind of repeating those key vocabulary words until we started to figure out, oh, okay, this is the word for desk. Bi-o-ro, bi-o-ro, bi-o-ro. And I thought, well, this must be somewhat similar to what a baby experiences, right?

Where there's all this conversation going around. Blah, blah, blah. They start to become active communication partners and trying to engage in that world, but how do they make sense of it? Parents often see themselves as the know-it-all French teacher and the babbling baby as a clumsy student. Rachel says this framework is the one that's mostly used in studying infant language development. But the baby is applying as much of a role in this interaction as the

mom. By changing the way that they babble and what they're looking at, might actually be changing their opportunities for learning because they're changing what the parents say. It's kind of what we call a social feedback loop. So when the baby babbles, mom responds, the way mom responds actually will change in real time what the child says next. And they go around and around in this conversation

influencing each other. There's a word to describe a back and forth exchange, where the thing that one person says affects what another person says. This feedback loop of communication and learning is what we call language. Baby's make as many as a thousand vocalizations every day. On average, parents respond to about 60% of these babbles. Even just silently responding, if the mom just acknowledges the infant's vocalization with a touch, leans in smiles and touches the baby, The infant will immediately, within the span of just 10 minutes, start to produce more speech-like vocalizations. So that just that nonverbal feedback,

that acknowledgement of the baby's vocalization, changes in the moment how they're babbling. Rachel says that when babies are babbling, they are more receptive to new information. Parents can take advantage of this by having conversations with their baby. And one rule of being a good conversationalist, stay attentive to what your partner is saying. So parents that are just talking constantly about irrelevant things that aren't what their

child is looking at. For example, if a baby is looking at a ball and I'm talking about this cup over here that I'm playing with, well, you're actually providing mismatching communication, mismatching information for them, that's going to make it harder to learn. Rachel says if you listen closely, babbling often falls into four distinct categories. They have different sounds and they elicit different responses. The first type is called QRV. QRV is the least mature infant vocalization. So the sounds are quasi-resident vocalization.

And so it's those really nasal-creaky sounds that a lot of times parents interpret almost as fussing. The second type is called F-R-V. So that's a fully-resident vowel. And around three or four months, the baby's vocal track opens up and then they're able to produce those more open kind of adult-like sounding vowels that kind of have those O's or A quality and so parents recognize those as more speech-like than those first creaky nasalized vowels and so they're more likely to respond to those. The third is called MSFR.

So that's a marginal syllable, and babies will start around six or so months throwing consonants into the mix. So you can hear in that sound there's kind of a DJ kind of zh sound, but it's a slow drawn out transition between when the continent stops and when the vowel begins. And the pinnacle. The piesta resistance, if you will. So that's what's called a canonical syllable. And those are those nice babas and dadas that parents naturally associate with babbling. And so babies start regularly producing those pretty frequently around nine months. And parents react very strongly to these canonical syllables.

They hear them as the most speech-like. They tend to often interpret them as approximations of words. So, you know, in that example, if a baby was holding a ball, a mom would be very likely to respond, oh, oh, that's a ball? Yep, you're right, that's a ball. You tried to say ball, that's great. To Rachel, these different vocalizations are endlessly fascinating. Oh, oh, that's a ball, yep, you're right, that's a ball, you tried to say ball, that's great. To Rachel, these different vocalizations are endlessly fascinating. Now that she knows how to telepath the QRVs, from the FRVs, and the MSFRs, from the canonical

syllables, she simply can't stop herself. On my wedding day, I remember very distinctly, I was in graduate school the time and knee-deep encoding this all the time, spending hours listening to these different sounds. And I remember being up at the front of the church about to say my vows and hearing some babies out in the audience, babble and kind of immediately coding it and going, oh, that was a marginal syllable. And then thinking, no, focus, this is a very important moment you're supposed to be attending to what you're past your saying,

but I couldn't help but have my attention pulled by the baby in the audience and trying to code what she was saying. You don't have to memorize all the jargon to take away something valuable from the research. Just knowing that when babies are babbling, they're ready to learn, that can be a useful takeaway for everyone. When we return, we discuss two final elements of baby language. One is going to make you very happy.

The other? Well, that's something you don't want to hear as you're saying your wedding boughs. A warning. If you're driving or listening to the story as you're cooking, you're about to hear something very distracting. This is Katrina Doudna of Sunnyvale, California. It's dinner time. She's throwing a tantrum because she wants to sit at the head of the table. Problem is, the table's round. There is no head. When she was in the midst of a tantrum,

she picked something that she knew was completely unreasonable. I don't want my feet. Take my feet off. I don't want my feet. I don't want my feet. That's Katrina's mom, Noemi. She says three-year-old Katrina used to throw tantrums all the time.

I once teased her, which is a turn out to be a big mistake, but I went and said, well, okay, let's go get some scissors and take care of your feet. No! My curiosity was focused on what are the elements of the tantrums, you know, the snips and snails and puppy dog tails or what. This is Mike. It's Mike Potegal. I am currently an associate professor in the program on Occupational Therapy at University of Minnesota.

Mike was inspired to study tantrums after witnessing his own daughters, operatic meltdowns. Among the things that I learned from that was that there was a sequence in which various behaviors appeared, various behaviors of which tantrums are composed. Just like Rachel Albert did with babbling, Mike picked out a rhythm in the cacophony of his daughter's tantrums. To prove his point, he teamed up with a colleague, James Green, he's a psychologist at the University

of Connecticut. We developed a onesie that toddlers can wear that has a high quality wireless microphone sewn into it. Parents put this onesie on the child and press a go button on the equipment. And then they waited for a meltdown. James and Mike recorded more than a hundred of them and what they found confirmed their hypothesis. There are two major emotional, I think of them as emotional behavioral components of tantrums.

The first is anger, hitting, kicking, screaming, throwing things, pushing and pulling. And the other component is distress. Wining, crying, throwing the self down that is dropping to the floor, and comfort seeking. Don't confuse these components with stages. Mike says the behaviors occur simultaneously. The distress is more consistent. Throughout the tantrum, from its beginning to its end. The anger punctuates the tantrum. It provides the dramatic spikes and it also tapers toward the end. In every case the anger terminates before the distress. Mike says there's a reason that most tantrums end with a distress call.

Because the distress, sadness, tends to elicit comfort giving and so it would make sense from an evolutionary perspective if the anger which is disruptive is smoothed over by the stress component which then other things equal will call for parent comforting the child. Let's go back to Katrina Doudna, a three-year-old Maestra who's throwing a fit because she can't sit at the head of the family's circular dining table. Dad tries to reason with her.

James Green says that he's fallen into the same trap before. When children are at the peak of anger, and they're screaming, and they're kicking, probably asking questions, might prolong that period of anger. Dad decides to intervene. I'm going to take you in this chair for you. Now Katrina's on the floor. She grabs a stool and slams it against the wall. It seems like things are escalating, but James says it's just the opposite. Once she's thrown herself on the floor and thrown something or in this case knock the chair against the wall. We're probably on the downslope of this tantrum. She's spent a lot of energy screaming yelling and now doing these physical behaviors.

Listen to Katrina and pay attention to how the register of her voice changes. Mike says in many cases, parents can safely ignore their child's tantrums. And this approach has a formal name planned ignoring, and it basically means turning your back on the child and walking out of the room. Because talking to them and telling them to stop is giving them attention, albeit negative attention. This works best when the child throws a tantrum to get attention, or because you've said no to eating cookies at dinner. But if the child throws a tantrum and responds to something

you've asked them to do, a very different approach is appropriate. And the reason for that is that what the tantrum does is it's basically a stall. It's a way for the child to not comply with the parent request. And so the best approach, if it can be managed, is to get the child to comply with the request. For younger children, this can be done with a hand over hand, a kind of forced cooperation. So you can say to the child, okay, get your PJs on, and if the child refuses, you can say, okay, I'm going to count to three or five or whatever you like. And if you have not begun putting

your PJs on, I'm going to put my hands on your hands and help you do it. And children really do not like this. Because he says it's a threat to their autonomy, and if the child still doesn't comply, maybe you can use it as an opportunity to do some research, just like Mike. We would walk down the street and I'd see a kid having a tantrum and I would say I would mutter or say out loud to my wife, Dato, and then of course you'd give me a side-long look about what's wrong with you.

We've talked so far about the secret languages of dancing and babbling. We've looked at the grammar of temper tantrums. We're getting close to the end of our story, and that brings us to Lala Bice. Laura Cerelli, the first researcher we featured on dancing and synchronization, has also done work on the language of music with infants. Across cultures, we all engage with music and we do it at such an early age. So we really wanted to continue to explore this idea that one of the real benefits and perhaps one of the underlying reasons why we invest so much time in energy and music across cultures is because of these social and emotional implications. Remember the magic of the cleanup song that Laura talked about earlier? She and her fellow researchers wanted to closely examine the effect of music on babies and their caregivers.

They asked parents to volunteer to come into the lab with their babies. 30 mothers said they would do it. They would be in a sound proof room, and babies would be sat in a little high chair, and moms would sit facing them. They were also measuring stress levels. So we used little stickers on the bottom of the baby's foot and on the mother's fingertips. And what we're able to measure with this is actually their sweat gland activity. The mother is then sang two versions of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, one version, was upbeat. The other.

What's a lullaby? What we found was that when mom sang in a playful way, both mom and babies arousal levels stayed stable. But when mom sang in a soothing way, both mom and babies arousal levels decreased as the song progressed. So what's this, this is telling us is that lullabies are really working to calm not only baby, but also the mother. And so this supports this idea that there's a function here.

Is this telling us just what, is it just confirming what our intuitions are telling us? Or do you think it's telling us something more than that? Annick Dolly I'm sure most parents would agree that will abide suit their babies. But usually when we're singing will abise to our babies, we're holding them and we're rocking them and we're adding all of this really important soothing tactile information. So we wanted to know what the song is doing, removing all of that tactile input. So the babies are sitting in the high chair, they're facing their mom, but they're not experiencing that holding and that rocking, that typically comes along with all the bias.

But I think the really interesting thing here is we usually think of that unidirectional relationship like when mom's saying to babies it is to change the baby's behavior, but I think it's the really new interesting thing here is considering how it's also affecting the mom. Indeed, if there's one thing that all this research shows is that communicating with babies is not a one-way street. Parents and caregivers are shaped by what babies say and sing and scream, just as babies are hungrily soaking up information from adults. When we think about raising a human, it's natural that most of us think about the role that adults play in shaping their children. What's less clear, but what is abundantly true, is that babies

are every bit is involved in raising humans of their own. It's not just a figure of speech, we're all always growing up. This week's show was produced by Parth Shah and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Raina Cohen, Jenny Schmidt, Thomas Liu and Laura Quarell. We like to end our podcast by acknowledging an unsung hero each week. This is usually a person who is working behind the scenes who helps us create the show. Since this episode is dropping right around Mother's Day, we want to recognize all the mothers of the Hidden Brain team.

Watzala, Melanie, Dorothea, Bella, Toby and Linda. Thank you for your work in raising us humans. You truly have made Hidden Brain possible. Today's episode is part of an NPR-wide project called How to Raise a Human. You can find more stories about parenting at npr.org. I'm Shankar Vidantam and this is... AHHHHH! AHHHHH! AHHHHH! AHHHHH! AHHHHH! AHHHHH!