Many of us are guilty of talking to babies as if they were, umm, babies… But in the largest global study of its kind, researchers found baby talk is a universal phenomenon. More than 40 scientists helped to collect and analyse 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents on 6 continents in 18 languages from communities ranging from hunter-gatherers in Tanzania to Beijing urbanites. The results showed that parents engaged in baby talk – or ‘parentese’ to use the more technical term – in all of the cultures analysed. Despite the language differences, kid-chat sounds remarkably similar among cultures, with parents using a high-pitched, sing-songy voice that differed from the way they communicate with someone who can hold their own heads up. Scientists have long argued that baby talk has important developmental and evolutionary functions – how that works between adult partners is still to be adequately derided…