LiveScience brings together two fascinating studies on motherese–the swooping, exagerated way that mothers speak to their babies. In the first study, scientists played different examples of English baby-talk to a group of non-literate, hunter-horticulturalists in Ecuador who speak Shuar. The Shuar-speakers could tell what the English mothers intended over 70% of the time. But baby-talk isn’t just human. It turns out that rhesus monkey mothers also speak to their babies with exagerated, musical pitch.
