Babies Prefer The Voices Of Their Peers To Mom And Dad

We are sorry to inform you new moms and dads but even though your infants genuinely appreciate your high-pitched coos, they rather prefer listening to sounds from other babies.

A collaborative research was being carried out focusing on how babies see speech with infant vocal properties. The tests were done on 7-month-olds, the age when infants are just about to start babbling. The objective was to see how infants respond to vowel sounds spoken by different speakers. For the purpose of the experiment, as you can see in the video above, the babies were sat opposite a screen showing a checkerboard pattern. They could turn a sound on or off by glimpsing at or away from the checkerboard. Just like the baby in our video, infants appear readily "tuned" to sounds made by very small speakers just like themselves.

The results of this research strongly indicate that infants have a definite preference for speech sounds that are similar to theirs in terms of the combination of high pitch and resonance. This shouldn’t discourage mom or dad to “ooh” and “aah” in high voices. Babies do react to these kinds of sounds. Still, their own vocalizations seem to better capture and hold infant attention, now and then prompting positive feelings. This may stimulate infants to be vocally energetic and make it easier to assess their own vocalizations, perhaps stimulating and supporting the utterance of their first words.