Babies Prefer To Listen To Other Babies Than Their Parents – Study

One reason to get your baby to socialise with other babies is because babies want to listen to other babies more than they want to listen to their parents.

That’s the new finding from a study by McGill University which found 6-month-old babies prefer to hear sounds from other babies rather than from a female voice, according to the university’s press release.

“Babies are much more interested in hearing other babies babble away than they are in listening to what their parents have to say,” The Huffington Post UK reported. “And who can blame them? But aside from looking for a welcome reprieve from having to hear their mom and dad bang on about the same old tired topics of conversation, the researchers believe there could be a very important reason for this: It may help to kick start the processes involved in learning how to speak.”

To find this, researchers played vowel sounds from a baby’s voice and a mother’s voice. The researchers found that most infants listened to the other baby’s voice 40 percent longer than they listened to the woman’s voice.

The babies would also smile or move around when they heard the sound of other babies, while they would react passively and show disinterest when their parent spoke.

Babies enjoy listening to another infant’s voice because it allows them the freedom to explore making and hearing new sounds, which helps them learn to speak.

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“As adults, we use language to communicate. But when a young infant starts to make speech sounds, it often has more to do with exploring than with communicating … in fact babies typically vocalize when they are alone, without any interaction or eye contact with others,” McGill University professor Linda Polka said in the study. “That’s because to learn how to speak babies need to spend lots of time moving their mouths and vocal cords to understand the kind of sounds they can make themselves. They need, quite literally, to ‘find their own voice.’”

Source: reviewjournal.com