ZURICH, June 29 -- Talking to babies in a high-pitched voice and using exaggerated pronunciation seems natural to most parents. This way of speaking, found in all human cultures, is thought to facilitate language learning in young children. But is this universal human practice shared by our closest cousins? A study published in the journal Science Advances reveals that great apes communicate very little with their young, suggesting that our propensity for "baby talk" is a distinctive feature of the human species.

Previous research has shown that this "baby talk" promotes vocabulary and language skills, but its evolutionary origins remained a mystery. To find out more, a team of biologists and linguists from the University of Zurich and t...