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Viral gibberish experiment has people convinced that all babies speak a 'secret language'

We all want to be in on this joke.

Photo credit: Canva

We need a translation, stat.

The general understanding is that—beyond the basic primal sounds that signal hunger, discomfort, etc.,—babies don’t truly grasp language until they begin to form the words that we adults teach them. But what if they have a secret language all their own that we grown folks simply can’t comprehend?

That’s the question raised in an adorable new trend taking over TikTok, where parents watch their wee ones react to the recorded sound of another baby’s gobbledygook. The way they all seem to find it hilarious at one particular part has moms and dads wondering if maybe it’s not gobbledygook at all, but instead a joke our matured ears aren’t in on.

Below is one particularly viral, extremely cute clip, that really gives you an idea. Across the screen, mom writes “I think she understood” as a sweet baby girl lights up and giggles towards the end of the baby spiel.

@jatziri.veliz

Baby language , love It 🥰 #babygirl #babyoftiktok #sahmsoftiktok #1yearolldbaby #funnybabyvideos

Aaaaaaand so does this baby…

@stackcracklepop

lol well seems like she likes what she heard 🥰😂 #babiesoftiktok

Aaand this one…

@viviantrejos

Jejeje ##risadebebe #bebeinteligente #mamaprimeriza #maternidad #paratii #foryoupage #bebeprematuro

You get the picture.

The noticeable pattern left many adults feeling out of the loop. On the bright side, it made for some fun comments.

"I need a translator."

"Probably means 'just laugh let's confuse the adults.'"

"At this point, we all need to start studying 'Gibberish' as a language.”

“I swear some curse words was in there.”

“Ok so we all need to know what was said because this is the 5th video seen in 10 minutes and my 14month laughs every time. We gotta learn baby talk ASAP!”

“Yeah they’re definitely talking about us.”

“Sad part is we will never be in on the joke.”

The concept of a secret baby language is something that’s seemingly always compelled the adult world. For heaven's sake, do we all remember the not one, not two, but FIVE Baby Geniuses movies? You know, the one where evil scientists discover the infants have highly sophisticated conversation and put them up in a lab to try to decipher it all? All cinematic masterpieces.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

However, all jokes aside, there might be something to this. Sure, babies don’t understand words like we do, but studies have found that they can pick up on the emotions of others, including other babies, even at five months old. So it could be argued that these babies are all intuitively responding to whatever silly, happy mood was going on with the baby in the recording.

Furthermore, other research has found that babies tend to prefer listening to other babies babble over listening to their own parents, so it looks like we’re’ gonna be out of the joke forever! But we can still enjoy it from afar.

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Researchers have found that 'baby talk' connects all of humanity

It's a language we all speak.

via Pixabay

A father cradling his infant son.

It's almost impossible to be handed a baby and not immediately break into baby talk. In fact, it seems incredibly strange to even consider talking to a baby like one would an adult. Studies have shown that babies prefer baby talk, too.

Researchers from Stanford found that babies prefer to be spoken to in baby talk or “parentese” as scientists refer to the sing-songy cooing we do when talking to infants.

“Often parents are discouraged from using baby talk by well-meaning friends or even health professionals,” Michael Frank, a Stanford psychologist, told Stanford News. “But the evidence suggests that it’s actually a great way to engage with your baby because babies just like it–it tells them, ‘This speech is meant for you!’”

The big question that has eluded scientists is whether parentese is a universal language or varies by culture.

"Most of the research looking at this have studied urban societies in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Sweden, Russia," Courtney Hilton, postdoctoral fellow and principal author of "Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures," told NPR. "But to make a rigorous claim that there is any kind of instinct to do this, we have to study more diverse cultures."

Hilton, along with a team of researchers, collected 1,615 recordings from 21 cultures across six continents over a period of three years to find out whether parentese was a universal language. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

What researchers found was that everyone changed their rhythm, volume, speed and other vocal traits when talking to infants. It didn’t matter if they were in San Diego, East Africa, New Zealand or China.

via Pixabay

“Our study provides the strongest test yet of whether there are acoustic regularities in infant-directed vocalizations across cultures,” Hilton said. “It is also really the first to convincingly address this question in both speech and song simultaneously. The consistencies in vocal features offer a really tantalizing clue for a link between infant-care practices and distinctive aspects of our human psychology relating to music and sociality.”

So, according to research, if you hand someone a baby anywhere in the world, they would begin to speak to it in parentese, regardless of their culture, location, economic status or language.

The research makes it appear as though parentese is hard-wired into all of humanity. As infants, we seem to be drawn to those who speak it; as adults, we instinctually drop into the vocal patterns when communicating with a baby.

"These commonalities are almost woven into our biology," Hilton said. "From people in crowded urban centers in Beijing, all the way to a tiny hunter/gatherer society in South Africa, there is something we share. It's a kind of instinct that ties people together."

In a world that is divided by race, class, culture, language, politics and geopolitical forces, there’s something comforting in knowing that on a deeper level we all react to infants the same way. It seems that no matter who we are or where we live, babies bring out the best in humanity.

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Baby talk may sound kind of weird, but it's actually an awesome evolutionary phenomenon.

Photo by Carly Rae Hobbins on Unsplash
woman riding on back of man

A lot of us find baby talk to be very ... weird.

You know, that kind of high-pitched singsong kind of lingo that only seems to occur around small babies or funny-looking dogs? It's totally weird. But we all do it.

"Who-o-o's a good boy? Who is? Who is?"

It just seems to happen, like there's some sort of switch in our brain that turns on and transforms us from articulate human beings into human beings who sound like they swallowed an Auto-Tune machine.

Baby talk isn't limited to a handful of languages, either — it's been observed nearly everywhere — including in English, Arabic, Hindi, and Mandarin-speaking cultures, to name just a few.

A lot of scientists, however, don't find baby talk weird at all. They find it absolutely fascinating.

Language is something we use every day, but it's one of the most interesting puzzles in biology. Figuring out how babies learn to talk can help us understand how our own brains process language and maybe even how language evolved in the first place.

Bonobos, one of our closest evolutionary relatives, may have their own form of baby talk.

Scientists have found that using baby talk might actually help infants learn words faster.

Of course, scientists usually don't call it "baby talk," preferring somewhat more clinical terms like "parentese," "motherese," or "infant-directed speech."

But one study from the University of Washington found that 2-year-olds whose parents regularly had long conversations with their kids in parentese had more than double the vocabulary of kids who got the least exposure to it.

Why? It turns out babies like the singsongy tone of voice that comes with baby talk.

It's not the made-up words, like goo-goo ga-ga; instead, it's that weird tone of voice we use. There's something about that pattern of long, exaggerated sentences ("Helloooo, lil' bay-bee" vs. "Greetings, small infant," or just "Hey", for example) that babies seem to tune in on.

The high-pitched sounds we use when speaking in baby talk appear to be better at keeping babies' attention than when we speak with more normal intonation and inflections.

Those big, grand exaggerations we tend to use in baby talk also help convey emotion better than our normal adult speech.

Imagine trying to learn a new language — when it comes to figuring out which words are happy and which are sad, would you rather talk to Miss Piggy, whose tone of voice always lets you know what she's feeling, or Sam the Eagle, whose voice remains the same no matter what he's talking about?

Scientists also think the repetitive sounds used when speaking in baby talk (think "ma-ma," "da-da," or "choo-choo") might also help cement the words in a baby's brain.

In a recent study from the University of Edinburgh, scientists put 18-month-old kids in a room with a computer screen.

Something like this, anyways...

In each test, they showed each of the kids two unfamiliar objects. One object was given a repeating made-up name, like "nee-nee." The other object's made-up name didn't have a repetitive sound.

When the researchers later tested the kids again, they found the kids were better at remembering the name of the object with the repeated syllable.

So, parents and friends of parents with infants, now that you know this, go ahead and your singsongy baby talk flag fly.

You might feel weird using baby talk or maybe other people think you're weird for doing so — but armed with this knowledge, you can go right ahead and embrace the baby talk. After all, no matter what other people think, you know what you're really doing.

You're helping your kid learn to speak.

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