Professor Denis Burnham

Much more than baby talk

During his illustrious career investigating the science of speech and infant development, Professor Denis Burnham has discovered many things about the way infants learn to communicate. The ‘BabyLab’ he established at the ground-breaking MARCS Institute for Brain Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University has, alone, tracked the progress of thousands of tots throughout their childhood.

However, it was as an experience while completing his Honours degree at the University of New England (1971-1974) that, with hindsight, Denis believes shaped his future life's work. He was a 23-year-old expectant father, studying new theories on child development, psychology, and philosophy, including the age-old chestnut of nature versus nurture.

"I had bought a book on child development and asked Professor Paul Barratt, who was then the head of the Psychology Department, what else I should do to prepare for our first baby," Denis says. "Paul turned to me and said: 'Throw the book away and just be a parent'."

It proved prophetic advice. Because, for all his research and fascinating findings, Denis is constantly reminded that basic human instincts, interactions and emotions are at the heart of how a child learns. "As I have done more and more research, I've realised that the social and emotional development of a child and their parent is all bound up together," he says.

"It used to be considered that kids start learning language when they start to talk, but we now know that three months before birth they can hear their mother's voice in the womb, and when they are born they prefer their mother's voice to others and also their native language to other languages.

"My most recent work around the way parents talk to babies and babies talk to their parents shows that together they form a little microcosm. It's like a dance. The babies’ and the parents’ behaviour are in synch. Each gives and responds to the other’s cues, without even being aware of it. They teach each other simply by engaging."

In March 1973, Denis’s third year at UNE, baby Lachlan arrived, inspiring Denis to think about a multitude of philosophical and psychological theories. But it also afforded important opportunities to learn home truths in practice."As most parents know, the baby teaches you how to be a parent," Denis says. "You don't deliberately set out to teach them language - it just emerges. People adjust their speech, its structure, rhythm and emotion (using what's known as 'baby talk' or infant-directed speech) to best benefit the baby, and the baby asks for the appropriate input at each stage of development. Parents don't have to follow a child development manual. They simply need to trust their instincts and trust in their baby."

Building on some early work on infant vision, Denis was the first in Australia to investigate the emerging area of speech perception in infants and how it underpins language development. From inquiring into our earliest visual, auditory and language development, into music and speech interactions and even how adults process language, Denis has become one of Australia's foremost language development researchers. His work and that of others, including his many research students, has contributed greatly to the growing scientific and community awareness of the importance of very early experience, and to the establishment of such practices as mandatory newborn hearing testing in Australian hospitals. In addition, his findings have helped countless families deal with speech issues, dyslexia and clinical conditions like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

During his 16 years at the helm, the MARCS Institute grew to employ 170 people (including 50 PhD students) investigating a complex array of subjects: human visual and auditory perception and cognition, neuroscience, psychophysiological brain responses, bioelectronics, neuromorphic and biomedical engineering, computational modelling and even how we interact with robots. Three MARCS Institute BabyLabs in Greater Western Sydney have since inspired others in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, Thailand and Singapore, the latter two in collaboration with MARCS.

Professor Kate Stephens, current director MARCS Institute (where Denis continues to work as a research professor) says his leadership can be felt throughout the world, in the graduate students and postdoctoral researchers "modelling his dynamism and passion for the pursuit of knowledge and science communication" and in the laboratories and universities that build on his "creative research methods and scientific discoveries".

Language is critical to a range of developmental, social and emotional milestones as we grow, but is also "our means of using the accumulated wisdom and learning of centuries". "It's just so damn interesting," Denis says. "Knowing more and more about language development means that when children are having problems we can maybe intervene earlier, and possibly circumvent future problems."

After conducting some of the first studies in Australia on infants’ visual perception at Monash University, and the first studies on infant speech perception in Australia throughout his 18 years at the University of New South Wales, Denis was head-hunted by Western Sydney University to establish the then MARCS Research Centre.

"At MARCS Institute today we study human communication; the way we develop the ability to interact with others," he says. "We have engineers and linguists and musicians doing all this inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary stuff. But the over-riding message we try to get out is for parents to just engage with and interact with their babies. This is one of the biggest predictors of later language development."

Many of the Masters and PhD students Denis has supervised are now his collaborators, and he is widely revered for his commitment to teaching and learning. He credits MARCS Institute's outstanding research prowess in great part to its collegial, community-based approach, which he sought to instigate from the very start. "And this was instilled in me very early at UNE by the close-knit student and academic community and the lively and convivial interaction between staff and students," he says.

Denis and his wife Joanne went on to have three more children after Lachlan, and come October they will have 11 grandchildren. "Right from Lachlan's birth I've been intrigued by what babies can do and learn," he says. "But I can't help but think that in some ways we are reinventing the wheel. In modern times, people are having babies later in life and are more analytical about children-rearing. Some even question the value of baby talk to infants, thinking it will stunt their language development. The truth is that even those who question its utility automatically produce baby talk that actually teaches infants about the nature of the language around them. Most importantly, unbeknown to infant or parent, the amount of baby talk to the child actually predicts their later vocabulary and language development.

"Of course, an added bonus is that babies gurgle and laugh and enjoy it, and it makes us feel good as well. Baby talk has evolved over eons to be one of the many inbuilt wise, but unconscious, behaviours by which we humans teach our young. Now science is rediscovering its importance and benefits, with possible applications to sub-optimal situations - like post-natal depression in the parent or sensory impairment in the infant - that might interfere with normal development."

Congratulations Professor Denis Burnham, one of our 2020 UNE Distinguished Alumni Award winners.