The poetics of babytalk

Abstract

Caretaker-infant attachment is a complex but well-recognized adaptation in humans. An early instance of (or precursor to) attachment behavior is the dyadic interaction between adults and infants of 6 to 24 weeks, commonly called "babytalk." Detailed analysis of 1 minute of spontaneous babytalk with an 8-week infant shows that the poetic texture of the mother's speech-specifically its use of metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding-helps to shape and direct the baby's attention, as it also coordinates the partners' emotional communication. We hypothesize that the ability to respond to poetic features of language is present as early as the first few weeks of life and that this ability attunes cognitive and affective capacities in ways that provide a foundation for the skills at work in later aesthetic production and response. By linking developmental social processes with formal cognitive aspects of art, we challenge predominant views in evolutionary psychology that literary art is a superfluous byproduct of adaptive evolutionary mechanisms or primarily an ornament created by sexual selection.

The Artification Hypothesis and Its Relevance to Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Neuroaesthetics

“…Transcripts such as these reveal poetic features: talk to babies is composed of phrases, each (whether having two or nine syllables) about three and a half to five seconds in length-the temporal length of a poetic line, a musical phrase, and a phrase of speech in adults (Lynch et al 1995;Turner 1985)-and these phrase segments are combined with others in "stanzas" that comprise a theme with variations. Subtler poetic features of language such as metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding are discernible with further close analysis (Miall and Dissanayake 2002). Despite the fact that in some societies there is no tradition of talking to babies, other rhythmically regular noises such as tongue-clicking, hissing, grunting, or lip-smacking may be used and supplemented by physical movements and exaggerated facial expressions.…”

The Artistic Infant Directed Performance: A Mycroanalysis of the Adult’s Movements and Sounds

“…It seems that the stimulation intensity overloads, until the baby puts a final end to the scene. Further on, as it can be appreciated, throughout this whole section the adult's on-line creation focalizes primarily in speech, in such a way that we estimate that an analysis of its poetry, following the resources used by Miall and Dissanayake (2003), might enrich the section's artistic analysis as a verbalsound-kinetic whole. …”

“…Dissanayake (2008)suggeststhatBartifying^-or making special by means of aesthetic operations-is the ancestral activity or behavior that gave rise to, and continues to, characterize or imbue all instances of what today we call art. Miall and Dissanayake (2003)havecalledBabytalk to the infant directed vocal and kinetic performances that typically appear between the baby's 6th week and 6th month. They were pioneers in studying infant directed performances with poetic resources in Babytalk, founding parallelisms, hyperboles, alliterations, assonance and rhymes, and episode organization with clear beginning or introduction, ending, and, sometimes, refrains or coda.…”

“…Our analysis sets on the adult's behavior, instead of spontaneous reactions of the communicating infant. This distinguishes our approach from those used in previous studies (e.g., Brand et al 2002), setting it closer to Miall and Dissanayake's( 2003) pioneer work on the poetics of babytalk. Our research is not about 'motionese'.…”

The Artification Hypothesis and Its Relevance to Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Neuroaesthetics

“…Transcripts such as these reveal poetic features: talk to babies is composed of phrases, each (whether having two or nine syllables) about three and a half to five seconds in length -the temporal length of a poetic line, a musical phrase, and a phrase of speech in adults (Lynch et al 1995, Turner 1985 -and these phrase segments are combined with others in "stanzas" that comprise a theme with variations. Subtler poetic features of language such as metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding are discernible with further close analysis (Miall & Dissanayake 2002). Despite the fact that in some societies there is no tradition of talking to babies, other rhythmically regular noises such as tongueclicking, hissing, grunting, or lip-smacking may be used and supplemented by physical movements and exaggerated facial expressions.…”