A recent article from the prestigious Journal of Duh, Mothers Better at Baby Talk Than Men, notes that:
Although infants don’t really understand when their parents speak to them, women seem to be better at baby talk than men.
While that’s not surprising, their evidence seems…odd:
A computer program designed by scientists in the United States to study how voice pitch, rhythm and stress communicate meaning suggests that mother’s coochy-coos are less ambiguous than dad’s.The program evaluated the properties of speech of six sets of parents who were told to encourage their babies and then to warn them to avoid dangerous objects.
It correctly differentiated between the majority of disapproval and approval tones.
But to the researchers’ surprise, the program correctly identified 12% more of the comments made by the mothers, suggesting that women use less ambiguous sound than men to convey to babies what they mean.
COOING DOES NOT COMPUTE
COOING DOES NOT COMPUTE
COOING DOES NOT COMPUTE
(Thanks, John, for tipping me off to such cutting-edge science!)