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Baby Sounds: Emotional Communication
Initially, an infant, being a preemie, has little capacity to respond to motherese. After a couple of months, the baby begins to make positive baby sounds, smile, and respond positively to rhythmic interaction. A mother-infant feedback loop of emotional communication develops.
Baby-to-mother emotional communication via musical code sends messages of hunger, frustration, distress. And also positive communication: contentment, happiness. Mothers know how to decode the messages, and also how to communicate back to the baby in the same non-verbal, emotional, musical way. This two-way non-verbal communication strongly reinforces mother-infant bonding.
Neither infant nor mother need to learn how to communicate emotionally with each other using this “musical” system. It’s inborn in both.
The presence of the infant probably changes the mother’s emotional state. Motherese successfully engages the attention of the infant, which begins to respond after several weeks and provides the mother with vital feedback on the infant’s survival needs.
Mothers in every culture communicate to their pre-lingual babies in the same specific way: raised pitch level, distinctive pitch contours, repetitive patterns, rhythmic patterns. These elements differ markedly from normal adult-to-adult conversation.