No matter the language, babies just like to be sung lullabies

There’s no point singing nursery rhymes with lyrics to infants, all they like is the melody. This is the interesting discovery made by researchers from the music laboratory at Harvard University (USA). According to their findings, infants are more attentive to the sounds made by a nursery rhyme than to the language in which it is sung. The results of their research were published on October 19, 2020 in the journal Nature human behavior.

Music more important than words

Like adults who like a song without understanding the lyrics, infants become more attached to the musicality of a song than to the words that compose it. “There is a long-standing debate about how music affects listeners, due both to previous experiences with music and to the basic understanding of our psychology.says Samuel Mehr, associate researcher in the Department of Psychology and principal investigator of the Harvard University Music Laboratory. Common sense tells us that infants find the lullabies they hear relaxing. Is it just because they’ve heard their parents’ song before and they know that means they’re safe? Or is there also something universal about lullabies that produces these effects, regardless of experience?” For the researchers, there is a hypothesis behind all this: infants appreciate music for its universal sound pattern and its relaxing side.

To confirm their words, they conducted experiments in 2018 and 2019 on musical psychology from childhood to adulthood. The 144 infants in the study were subjected to animated videos with two people singing or not singing a lullaby. The sixteen songs selected come from all over the world, and were originally produced to express love, heal the sick or encourage people to dance. These songs were performed in Gaelic (Scotland), in Hopi (an Aztec language) or in Western Nahuatl, a Central American language.

A feeling of peace and relaxation

In order to see the effect that the music had on them, the researchers were interested in the dilation of their pupil, their heart rate, the frequency of eye blinking and the direction of the gaze, synonymous with agitation or relaxation.

In the majority of cases, the infants’ heart rate slowed, their pupils dilated, and the child was relaxed. When parents were asked to listen to the tunes to find out which ones would be suitable for soothing their children, they instinctively chose the tunes that sounded like lullabies. This suggests to researchers that the building blocks of lullabies are universal, regardless of language.

“While music in general was relaxing, there was something particularly relaxing about lullabies, so in theory there could be ways to optimize the music we provide to infants, to make them more effectiveunderlines Connie Bainbridge, co-author of the study. Plus, it’s an interesting area to explore when it comes to the function of music — is it an adaptation we’ve evolved to have or a byproduct of language or auditory cognition? Our findings seem to support the idea that there is in fact an evolutionary function of music.”