In scientific research, this “baby talk,” is referred to as infant-directed speech or IDS. This intuitive, spontaneous and almost automatic way of speaking to infants has been studied for decades to understand why we use it to communicate with infants and what that says about child development.

In their research that has been published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, a team from the University of York in the UK and Aarhus University in Denmark set out to address whether IDS has a universal quality. For example, will IDS in English sound like it does in other languages? The research also goes on to address how this speech changes as the child gets a better grasp on language and speech.

In their meta-analysis, the researchers found that some characteristics of IDS, like pitch, melody and articulation rates, have the same properties across most of the world’s languages. But there was a difference in how people exaggerate the difference between vowel sounds in IDC across different languages.

“We use a higher pitch, more melodious phrases, and a slower articulation rate when talking to infants compared to how we talk to adults, and this appears to be the same across most languages,” said Christopher Cox, who led the study, in a press statement. Cox is a joint PhD scholar at the University of York and Aarhus University.

“In the English language, caregivers typically exaggerate the difference in vowel sounds in IDS, but this seemed to vary across other languages. For example, speakers of languages with lots of vowels would be more inclined to clarify this speech signal for their children,” Cox added.

So far, most research on IDS has focused on English and other European languages but the researchers argue that more work is needed to understand IDS in non-Western languages to better understand how it helps in child development.

The research showed that IDS changes over time as the child understands language and speech better. Over time, the people using IDS change most of its features—like pitch and speed of delivery—to more closely resemble how adults speak. But some features, like the high pitch and the melodic nature, continue into early childhood.