When we talk to minors, we speak almost without thinking, in a high-pitched, singing, and somewhat ridiculous tone of voice. According to some scientific papers, we do this to attract the attention of little ones who are often bombarded with hundreds of stimuli that their brains have not yet learned to capture. Adults’ “baby talk” helps little ones process information and distinguish their words from background noise. However Humans are not the only animals that have learned to address minors in this way; Dolphins also ‘childlike’ their voices when addressing their babies.
Bottlenose dolphins (tursiops truncatus) use their characteristic whistles to communicate with the rest of their social group. This is a unique and very important sign because it is equivalent to shouting your own name over and over. “A way to tell the rest of your group ‘I’m here, I’m here”, explains Laela Sayigh, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Institution of Oceanography in Massachusetts (USA) and co-author of the study. But when this signal is transmitted directly to the offspring, with what tone speaks his mother is in a much longer and higher range than usual.
This result was published in a study in the journal Nature. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesin which The whistles of nearly twenty mother dolphins were studied when they swam with their offspring, or when they swam alone or with adults. Scotland’s St. Andrews University researcher and co-author of this study, Peter Tyack, says this form of “talk” was “made by the 19 mothers in the study.”
The behavior of these dolphins has been monitored for over three decades.. To do this, the scientists several times placed special microphones to record the characteristic whistles of the same females in Florida’s Sarasota Bay. This means that there are years when females are accompanied by their young (the young often remain in their mother’s care for up to three years) and are alone or with adults.
The researchers focused only on the characteristic call, so they don’t know if dolphins use this infantile tone to address their offspring in other communication exchanges. they even help their teens learn to “talk”as in humans.
“It would make sense if there were similar adaptations in bottlenose dolphins,” explains Frants Jensen, a behavioral ecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who participated in the study. As the scientist recalls, bottlenose dolphins are highly acoustic and very long-living species. And “puppies must learn to vocalize many sounds to communicate”, he insists.
Perhaps this is why it is so important for him to be able to get to know his mother from an early age. According to scientists, it is important that you know how to distinguish your mother in order to understand if she is talking to you.
Despite different theories, little is known about why humans, monkeys, birds and dolphins talk like babies to address their young. Scientists believe it can help puppies learn to pronounce new sounds and in the case of human babies, it helps them pay more attention to speech. While we don’t yet have a satisfactory answer, we can conclude that this innate behavior is much more common than we thought.
Reference article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300262120
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