Babies Say “Mama”, “Dada”, First - We Finally Know Why

Around the world be it any continent, country, language or origin a child belongs to, somehow, “mama” and “dada” are most often, a baby’s first words ever uttered. This without doubt is the most delightful thing for the parents, but was until now quite a mystery for researchers, as to why these words only, why not something else. But it seems we finally have an answer to the riddle now.

A recent research, led by University of British Columbia post-doctoral fellow Judit Gervain, lends an insight into the minds of the babies who although do not have highly developed motor or neural skills but still have the ability to perceive and eventually learn the words from their mother tongue.

According to the research, the ability of children to pick up and speak words like ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ earlier than any other word, depends mainly on the very simple fact, that almost all languages have words for mother and father depicted in patterns of repeating sounds, thus making these words simpler for babies to catch and comprehend or retain.

"It's probably no coincidence that many languages around the world have repetitious syllables in their 'child words,'" Gervain said, citing "papa" in Italian and "tata" (grandpa) in Hungarian as examples.

The research which was published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is based on brain scans of 22 new borns, as young as 2-3 days only.

Even at such an early stage of development, these babies when were made to hear words ending in repeating syllables such as “papa”, “penana”, “mubaba”, “mama”, showed a distinctive increase in the brain activity, in the temporal and left frontal areas. This happened every time these words were played for the babies.

However, there was no response seen in the brain activity, when words like "mubage", "bamuba", "napena" and "penaku" all with non adjacent repetitions were played for the babies.

Such findings led the research team to believe that, not only are "mama" and "dada" or "papa", the most chosen words by parents to teach a baby, in all languages they are also the kind of words , which because of their repetitive nature in sound are easily recognised by babies and ultimately get engrained in the human brain.

"The language centre of most right-handed adults is located on the left side of the brain," Gervain said. "This is consistent with our finding with newborn babies and supports our belief humans are born with abilities that allow us to perceive and learn our mother tongue systematically and efficiently."

"The brain areas that are responsible for language in an adult do not 'learn' how to process language during development, but rather, they are specialized — at least in part — to process language from the start."