Gaga for goo goo: Wellington named the global capital of baby talk

Residents of the New Zealand city have the world's most extreme vocal changes when speaking to babies, a study has found

From small tribes in the remote Pacific islands to the teeming cities of China, humans share the common language of baby talk - but new research has discovered that Wellington, New Zealand, is the global capital of cooing.

An international study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, collected 1615 recordings of 410 people from 21 societies speaking and singing to an adult and then a baby in more than a dozen languages.