BABY TALK; INFANTS LEARN ESSENTIAL VOWELS, STUDY SUGGESTS.

Byline: Lauran Neergaard Associated Press 

All that baby talk adults use with infants isn't just silly cooing: Scientists say it appears to be vital in helping babies' brains absorb key building blocks of language.

And this high-pitched, drawn-out speech is universal, whether parents are speaking in English, Swedish or Russian.

University of Washington neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl says parents unconsciously exaggerate the vowel sounds that every infant - no matter what language he or she will ultimately speak - needs to master the phonetic elements of speech.

Take the word ``bead.'' People can say it so quickly that you might mistake the word for ``bed'' or ``bid.'' But hear mothers speak to their babies: ``Look at Mommy's pretty beeeeds,'' Kuhl's tape recordings show mothers saying in a singsong that stresses and stretches the vowels.

In a study being published today in the journal Science, Kuhl reports that 5-month-olds begin to enunciate the three vowel sounds common to all human languages - ``ee,'' ``ah'' and ``oo'' - which are the same ones that mothers who speak different languages universally stress to their babies.

This ``parentese'' is ``more than a melody. It's a real tutorial on language, and they didn't even know they were doing it,'' Kuhl said.

The study is ``quite interesting,'' said Richard Aslin, a University of Rochester cognitive sciences professor who studies infant speech development.

``There has to be some period of time early in life when you're figuring out what . . . vowel sounds go together,'' he said. If parents are ``providing you with exaggerated versions of those vowel categories, that should make the task easier for the infant.''

But the study doesn't explain how the infant processes that information, Aslin said. ``They don't know whether, for example, if you had a mother who didn't exaggerate the vowels, would that have a negative effect on that mother's particular infant?'' he said.

Language researcher Peter Jusczyk of Johns Hopkins University agreed: The study ``provides information about what the input (to babies) looks like. Then we must take that information and say, `What does this really do for learning?' ''

At issue are tiny infants - younger than 6 months - learning their very first words, not the toddlers who need more than baby talk.

Kuhl discovered in 1992 that 6-month-olds learn to categorize vowel sounds that are meaningful in their native languages while ignoring subtle variations. She then tracked what sounds attract babies, and found that they turn toward adults - not just their parents - who speak in this singsong baby talk and often ignore regular conversation.

So parents can catch babies' attention with parentese, she concluded, but are the actual sounds important?

Kuhl and colleagues in Sweden and Russia tape-recorded 30 women in the three countries speaking to adults and then to their babies. The three languages were chosen because they have substantially different vowel systems.

Kuhl acoustically charted 2,363 words from the tapes that contained the three common vowel sounds of ``ee,'' ``ah'' and ``oo.''

Whether it was Seattle moms stressing those beads or mothers in St. Petersburg admiring ``bussi'' - Russian for beads - the mothers universally exaggerated the important vowels, Kuhl reports.