The earliest sounds that babies make tend to be "ma/muh" sounds, as they're smacking their lips to signal for food. Seems likely for language then to develop that sound into the word for "mother", the nearest object (food source as the case may be).

This pretty much explains away the entire article.

The progression of sounds that a baby learns is well understood, especially the physiological aspects of language development and acquisition.

If we accept as a premise that cultures would tend to assign words most relevant to babies according to their physiological capability, then it becomes obvious why words for mother, father, and even facial features would be strongly similar across cultures. And why the similarity will slowly diminish as the meaning of words becomes less important, functionally, for communication with a child.

And especially for simple words the phonetics would have very little to do with cognitive development (and evolutionarily-dictated language models), but be controlled almost entirely by a baby's physical constraints--e.g. huge tongue in a tiny mouth, poor motor control, etc.

It does explain similarity of words for familial relations, but not for things like "nose". Babies don't randomly say "nose", or something that sounds similar, while pointing at their nose.

No, but they learn the words for various body parts very early in life, usually before the age of 2 and beginning around 1-year-old. A 2-year-old also has significant physiological and neurological constraints on vocalizations.

There are also cognitive development constraints, of course.

The question is, from where do we get the correlation? If it's physiological or neurological, then there's nothing to support fanciful claims of innate language models. It's the cognitive constraints that can support fanciful claims, but you have to first show that it's those constraints, rather than the physiological or neurological constraints, that are controlling word choice.

Yeah, for a very, very, very small subset of words, the very first and most immediate things babies care about, this theory makes some sense.

For everything else, not so much.

100 basic words (the corpus of the study) is such a small subset, especially if you posit very strong correlations among subsets of those 100 words most likely to be used in the first year of life.

And especially considering that the researchers "reduced all sounds to 34 distinct consonants and 7 vowels." (Consider that the more we reduce and simplify the vocalizations the more likely we should expect correlations. For example, if we simplified all sounds to grunts we should expect tremendous overlap.)

The correlation of the corpus of 100 words isn't particularly surprising given what we already know about language development. The null hypothesis was that there'd be no correlation whatsoever (i.e. the sounds would be completely random), which I don't think anybody could reasonably expect.

Indeed. Especially when the article gives us this: "...the team found a lot more consistency across languages than they had expected." What does that mean? Were their originally expectations reasonable, or did they merely re-discover the birthday paradox?

I've heard that babies make the same 'ma' and 'pa' sounds regardless of context, and that it is vain parents who assume that the baby is addressing them :)

In Georgian, mother is "deda" and father is "mama", which lends further evidence to this :)

Three out of those four are Indo-European, and indeed the similarity between mother, madre & mata is no coincidence.

English: mom, dad

Arabic: ami, ab

Chinese: ma, ba

Zulu: umama, ubaba

IT's interesting how they all use the same vowels for the names they use to call mother/father. IS there a reason they use vowels vs say consonants?

Small children have trouble with pronouncing most consonants. Unformed palate, small tongue, lack of teeth.

The first two and the last are Indo-European languages; it appears that mother in Chinese is "mu".

It's "obaasaan" in Japanese, though. It'd become "baa" if you remove the polite syllables, and thus also ends up becoming a labial consonant (ओष्ट्य for those familiar with the verse in पाणिनी).

Curious indeed.

Note: Mother in Japanese is actually "okaasan" (or "haha"). "obaasan" is grand-mother apparently.

yeah mother in chinese is ma. I have always been curious about this as well.