Do you remember your baby’s first words? If your home language is American English, then chances are pretty good that those first words uttered by your baby were “mama and dada.” In fact, it is so common and expected, that many of us discount those words as the first. I consider my eldest child’s first word to be “gentle,” although he did say both mama and dada months before. (The word my youngest firs said was “uh-oh,” which tells you a lot about their personalities.)
A recent study suggests that it is no coincidence that the “baby” words for mother and father are what they are. In fact, many different languages feature similar types of words for mother, father, grandmother and grandfather, such as papa, nono, tata, etc. The study shows that the recognition of words with repeating sounds seem to be hardwired into the infant brain.
The researchers measured activity in the brains of babies who were two- and three-days old while the babies listened to a recording of made up words. Those words that contained directly adjacent repeating sounds triggered activity in the temporal and left frontal areas of the babies brains. Words without adjacent repeating sounds yielded no distinct response on the scans.
The study was published online in a journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and MSNBC.com also ran a story about the findings.
You know, I always wondered if something like this were true. Just looking at how similar the names are in different languages would lead you to believe that there was something inherently necessary in the word choices. Next, I hope that someone will decide to study the word “no” in different languages. There seems to be a connection to the word sounds for this meaning.
And by the way, “mama” is one of the most common ways to say “mother.” Several languages have this word or word sound, including Lingala, Mudnés, Neapolitan, Quechua, Italian, Romanian, Sardinian, Slovak, Swahili, Chinese, Spanish, and others.
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