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BARBIE AND GIRLS' BODY IMAGE
Motherese across Cultures
Jack Sprat
MOTHERESE ACROSS CULTURES
MOTHERESE ACROSS CULTURES
Motherese across Cultures
Motherese is the universal, infant-directed speech that seems to come to women on instinct when they have a preverbal baby. Some people discourage speaking in "baby talk," because they think that children can't possibly learn good English if they are not spoken to in good English. However, there is a lot of qualitative and quantitative research to suggest that motherese provides an effective bridge between mother and baby for linguistic transfer (TeechConsult's KIDSpad, 2010). Motherese enhances attention using reduplication, the use of special morphemes and phonological modification, and grammatical simplification, helping babies find boundaries between linguistic units. That, though, is not the most interesting thing about motherese. What are most interesting are the similarities and differences of motherese across cultures and linguistic groups.
Pitch Contour Comparisons between Chinese and American Mothers
Mechthild Papousek, Hanus Papousek, and David Symmes (1991) of Munich study the pitch changes that Chinese mothers and American mothers make while speaking to two-month-olds. They chose those two linguistic groups because one is a tonal language and one is a stress language, so they are basically as different as two languages can be. The researchers analyzed the speech contours and acoustic characteristics of the mothers' speech in interactional contexts like arousing/soothing, turn-taking, approving/disapproving, and didactic modeling, and they found that the contours...
The only difference between the groups was that the American mothers' pitch highs and lows were more extreme than for the Chinese mothers, so the comparison between the pitch contours would look something like this, where the dashed line represents the American mothers:
This shows cultural differences between Americans and Chinese people, namely that Americans are deservedly considered loud and Asians more restrained.
Thai and Australian Mothers Addressing Different Genders
Likewise, researchers Kitamura, Thanavishuth, Burnham, and Luksaneeyanawin (2001) analyzed motherese in tonal (Thai) and non-tonal (Australian English) languages. However, what they found was a difference in the way the mothers addressed boys vs. girls. Looking at the sound waves collected from mothers speaking to their infants at birth, three, six, nine, and twelve months old, they found that Australian mothers used a higher pitch and more rising utterance for girls, whereas the Thai mothers spoke in subdued tones with more falling utterance for the same gender group. This shows cultural preferences for the way girls should behave and should be behaved toward. Girls should quieter and more subdued in Thailand, whereas boys should "buck up" in Australia. The researchers did find that despite these differences, both groups of mothers' infant-directed speech was more exaggerated than when they were talking to adults, regardless of whether they were speaking to boys or girls.
Sign Language Motherese
The acoustic research on motherese has interesting implications for the profoundly deaf. They must have the same instincts for bridging the linguistic gap…
References
Burnham, D., Kitamura, C., Luksaneeyanwin, S., & Thanavishuth, C. (2001). Universality and specificity in infant-directed speech: pitch modifications as a function of infant age and sex in a tonal and non-tonal language. Infant Behavior and Development, 24(4), 372-392.
McLeod, P.J., Pegg, J.E., & Werker, J.F. (1994). A cross-language investigation of infant preference for infant-directed communication. Infant Behavior and Development, 17(3), 323-333.
Papousek, M., Papousek, H., & Symmes, D. (1991). The meanings of melodies in motherese in tone and stress languages. Infant Behavior and Development, 14(4), 415-440.
Reilly, J.S., & Bellugi, U. (1996). Competition on the face: Affect and language in asl motherese. Journal of Child Language, 23(1), 219-239.
TeechConsult's KIDSpad, Initials. (2010, August 19). Brain research on the importance of 'baby talk/motherese'. Retrieved from http://teechconsult.typepad.com/kids/2010/08/brain-research-on-the-importance-of-baby-talkmotherese.html.
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