|
Birds babies learn same way Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/06/03/babies.birds/http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/06/03/babies.birds/
Babies and birds learn same way
LONDON, England (CNN) --Scientists have discovered that babies learn to speak in the same way that birds learn how to sing.
Previously it was thought that babies learned by imitation, but in a report published Tuesday, U.S. researchers found that social interaction is as important for babies and fledglings as imitating sounds.
The scientists suggest that humans, like birds, require social cues to develop ways to communicate.
Past studies of birds have shown that many species use social feedback to learn songs.
Adult female cowbirds, which do not sing, use actions and signals to spur on particular song qualities in young male birds.
Scientists found that similar encouragement by a human mother's gestures to a baby's gurgling played a vital part in how the baby learnt to talk.
"The early, immature vocalizations of young songbirds and human infants play a crucial role in the development of more advance forms of communication," said Psychologist Michael Goldstein at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
"Young birds and babies can use the reactions of social companions to learn the acoustic forms that characterize mature speech and song," he said.
Goldstein and his colleagues observed eight-month-old infants and mothers in play sessions to determine if social interaction played a similar role for babies learning speech.
Thirty infants were monitored with their mothers over two 30-minute play sessions.
During the first session, how often infants vocalized and how the mothers reacted to each vocalization was monitored. The mother's responses were then manipulated by the scientists.
Half the mothers were asked to react to vocalizations through actions such as smiling, moving closer, and touching their infants while mothers in the other half were instructed not to synchronize their response to the infants when they babbled as they had done in the first session.
Both groups of babies received the same amount of attention from their mothers, but only infants in the first group received attention synchronized with vocalizations.
The scientists who analyzed the babies' babbles found that vocalizations from the first group developed faster than the second group during the play session.
Their babbling contained more syllables and faster consonant-vowel transitions than the group the whose responses between baby and mother were not synchronized.
"Data from this study demonstrate that vocal development is embedded in social processes," Goldstein concluded.
The scientists have reported their findings in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
|
|
