FSFRebecca Posted October 16, 2017 Posted October 16, 2017 'Mothers Consistently Alter Their Unique Vocal Fingerprints When Communicating with Infants' This research piece published in the research journal 'Current Biology' explains the following research findings: That infant-directed speech is an important mode of communication for early learning, that mothers shift the statistics of their vocal timbre when speaking to infants, that this systematic shift generalizes robustly across a variety of languages and notes that this research has implications for infant learning and speech recognition technology. The Guardian reported on the research saying: "Cooing to an infant might not seem like sophisticated speech, but it turns out that baby talk is more complex than previously thought. While it has long been known the pitch and rhythm of speech changes when mothers talk to their babies, researchers have now found the timbre of their voice changes too – a quality that reflects properties such as how velvety, raspy or nasal a sound seems." You can read The Guardian article in full here The research piece is here
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