Deciphering baby’s crying can be learned
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Cries, tears, chirping… Long before they know how to speak, young children master a rudimentary language that their parents know how to decipher, for example by distinguishing a cry of pain from a complaint associated with a more modest inconvenience. This ability, which many parents have surely discovered, is not innate, but rather the result of learning. This is the conclusion of a French study conducted at the University of Saint-Etienne and published, Monday, August 8, in Current Biology.
“This study is part of a larger project that aims to understand how information is encoded in babies’ cry and how an adult brain that listens to that cry will decode that information.”, explains Camille Fauchon, one of the authors working at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center. To do this, his team, led by Roland Peyron, collaborated with that of the bioacoustician Nicolas Mathevon, at the initiative of the project. For several years, Nicolas Mathevon and his collaborators have been studying the ability of parents to understand their child’s cries. In 2020, they had demonstrated in particular that fathers were just as competent as mothers in this task. This new study demonstrates that, to correctly identify the context at the origin of a baby’s cry, the experience of the adult is essential.
The scientists recruited some two hundred European participants of both sexes with varying exposures to child crying: parents, childcare professionals and people without children. All followed a very short learning period, in order to become familiar with a child by listening to some of his cries in identified contexts. When listening to new recordings, inexperienced adults were unable to distinguish crying of pain from crying of discomfort, while parents and professionals were able to.
“Sound Aversion”
“Babies have this innate ability to ask for help with very unpleasant sounds, they use sound aversion to trigger quick reactions in the parents’ brainexplains Luc Arnal, researcher at the Hearing Institute (Institut Pasteur, Paris). And people who are not yet familiar with this phenomenon cannot tell if a baby is crying or crying. » He explains that crying is made up of particular acoustic variations which are all clues that the adult will learn to extract and relate to specific situations.
In the tests that were conducted, parents of very young children were also able to extrapolate their competence to babies they had never heard before, unlike parents of older children. “The study does not explain this and whether young parents have an increased sensitivity because of their current exposure, or if it is because other mechanisms are taking place in the parents of children. older children », comments Nadège Roche-Labarbe, lecturer in child psychology (University of Caen). However, she is pleased with the results of this study: “It’s good to tell young parents that they have the means to become effective in understanding their child and that it is enough to spend time with him for that. »
However, this capacity for extrapolation has not been observed among early childhood professionals, most of whom work in the pediatric ward. The authors hypothesize a ” resistance “ in these people who thus protect themselves from a “emotional contagion” likely to interfere with their work.
The authors of the study now want to understand how an adult brain manages to discriminate between the acoustic variations that exist between different baby cries. “Perhaps the parent or practitioner has certain brain networks that are enhanced [par rapport à un adulte inexpérimenté], proposes Camille Fauchon. We are going to study subjects by MRI to observe this. »
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