Baby talk 101: How infant-directed speech helps babies learn language

© 2008-2015 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

Whether you think it's cute, or information technology makes you squirm, baby talk is a compelling scientific phenomenon. All effectually the world, people use a special register when they speak to the very young. This "infant-directed spoken language," or IDS, is recognizable for its college pitch and more melodic, emotionally-charged tone.

These features capture a babe's attention, and make information technology easier for her to grasp the emotional intentions of speech.

In fact, fascinating experiments show that adults listening to a foreign language are amend able to pick up on a speaker's emotions when he uses infant-directed speech. You lot can read more about it in my article on the attention-getting and emotional functions of babe talk.

Merely what nigh linguistic communication evolution? Does babe-directed speech assistance babies learn how to talk? Infant-directed voice communication includes many modifications that seem tailor-made for the language learner:

Information technology's slower, more repetitive, and more likely to exaggerate the pronunciation of vowels. In addition, people using IDS are more likely speak in shorter, simpler utterances. Experiments advise that these modifications assist babies develop several fundamental abilities, including

• the power to discriminate between different speech sounds
• the ability to discover the boundaries between words in a stream of speech
• the ability to recognize distinct clauses in a stream of speech

Information technology'south even possible that individual differences in the manner that parents utilise baby talk could bear upon how quickly infants acquire to speak.

So it seems that we have lots of reasons to forget our inhibitions and let loose with the babe talk. Here is the evidence.

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Infant-directed spoken communication may help babies tune into the sounds of their native language

When people use IDS, they may hyper-articulate, or "stretch out," the pronunciation of vowel sounds. Adults do the same affair when they talk to people with foreign accents (Uther et al 2007).

Does this exaggerated pronunciation make it easier for people to learn nearly speech sounds? If and so, we might predict that the more a mother hyper-articulates, the better her baby should perform on tests of voice communication perception.

Researchers Huei-Mei Liu and colleagues tested this idea past performing an experiment on Mandarin-speaking mother-infant pairs in Taiwan (Lui et al 2003).

The infants (aged 6 to 12 months) were presented with a groundwork audio—a Mandarin Chinese give-and-take repeated over and over once again on a loudspeaker. And so researchers switched to some other word, one that differed past a unmarried consonant (like switching from "jet" to "set"). If babies recognized the switch, they turned their heads toward the loudspeaker.

Using this measure, the researchers assessed each baby'south voice communication perception skills in a serial of 30 trials. They also recorded and analyzed the infant-directed speech patterns of the baby's mother.

The results? There was a strong correlation between maternal baby talk and infant speech perception skills.

Moms who tended to "stretch out" their vowels had babies who performed better on the speech perception exam.

And the link remained significant even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomic variables, similar parental education level and occupation.

This doesn't prove that babe-directed speech helps babies learn speech sounds. Information technology's possible that some unidentified factor–like an inherited aptitude for both speaking and perceiving speech communication sounds–explains the link between maternal speech communication clarity and baby voice communication perception.

Moreover, information technology's not clear how many people actually do hyper-clear when they address babies. A contempo experiment in Japan found that mothers had a slight tendency to enunciate less conspicuously when speaking to their infants (Martin et al 2015).

Only other research supports the notion that hyper-articulated baby talk helps listeners "tune into" the right speech sounds.

One experiment using playbacks of computer-synthesized speech establish that infants nether iv months of age could detect a change in the 2nd syllable of a 3-syllable utterance but when the second syllable was spoken in speech that simulated the high pitch, intensity, and stretched-out pronunciation of baby talk (Karzon 1985).

And researchers have used a computer model to test if baby talk makes vowel sounds easier to learn. Bart deBoer and Patricia Kuhl presented the calculator model with samples of adult-directed and infant-directed speech communication, then "asked" the model to place sure key vowel sounds. When the computer model was exposed only to baby talk, its answers were more than accurate (deBoer and Kuhl 2003).

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Baby talk makes information technology easier to learn well-nigh words

Babe talk may make it easier to hear the sounds of oral communication. But how do babies figure out which sounds make up a word?

It'southward a problem for whatsoever language learner. When adults talk to each other, their rapid-fire, ofttimes ungrammatical voice communication is difficult for a non-native speaker to parse. Words run together. It'southward hard to tell where i word ends and some other begins.

For instance, consider the phrase "Mama is happy." When it's spoken, information technology sounds similar "mamaizhappy." Where are the boundaries between words? To a person who doesn't know English, there are many possibilities, similar:

"Ma ma izhapp y"

"Mamaiz ha ppy"

"Ma ma izhappy"

So how do listeners find the right word boundaries?

Ane answer is that the listener hears lots of utterances and eventually their brains notice statistical patterns. She notices, for instance, that the sounds "iz happ" get paired upward less often that "hap pee." So she figures out that "happy" is a word and "izhapp" is not (Saffron et al 1996).

viii-month old babies tin do this by listening to many examples of developed-directed speech (Saffron et al 1996). But information technology seems to be difficult.

An experiment on slightly younger babies (vi.v to vii.5 months one-time) suggests that give-and-take sectionalisation is much easier when babies have been listening to babe-directed speech (Thiessen et al 2005).

Moreover, baby talk seems to help adults, too. When English-speaking adults were presented with playbacks of Mandarin Chinese, they were able to pick out and learn new words more easily when the playbacks featured babe-directed speech (Golinkoff and Alioto 1995).

It seems, then, that babe-directed speech has backdrop that make it easier for listeners detect the boundaries between words (Kemler-Nelson et al 1989; Thiessen et al 2005). Just what are these?

To some caste, baby talk helps because it's an attention-grabber.

A variety of experiments demonstrate that babies prefer listening to babe-directed spoken communication. And when babies pay more attending, they may be more probable to notice the statistical patterns in speech. Enhanced attending may also help them call back these patterns improve (Thiessen et al 2005).

Consistent with this idea, researchers written report that babe-directed speech communication–accompanied past direct eye contact–has a special effect on the brain.

When adults communicated face-to-face using babe-directed speech, babies experience enhanced activity in brain regions associated with processing auditory messages. Similar attempts using everyday, developed speech had no such effect (Lloyd-Pull a fast one on et al 2015).

Just baby-directed speech does more than perk a baby'due south interest. People using IDS tend to echo their words, giving babies extra opportunities to heed and learn.

When researchers tracked the development of 121 infants, they found that a mother'due south trend to utilise repetitive linguistic communication at 7 months predicted her child's vocabulary at 24 months (Newman et al 2015).

In addition, IDS is structured in ways that make it objectively easier to segment speech into words. Baby-directed  speech is slower and marks the spaces between phrases with longer pauses (Kuhl et al 1997). And speakers sometimes make primal words stand out.

For example, in English-speaking countries, adults addressing babies tend to alter their typical sentence construction, re-ordering things so that a new or important word comes at the terminate of an utterance (Fernald and Mazzie 1991; Aslin et al 1996).

People do the same thing when they are teaching adults new, technical terms (Fernald and Mazzie 1991), and it's a helpful ploy: In i study, 15-month-old infants were better able to recognize new words when these words appeared in the last position of an utterance (Fernald et al 1998).

And then can you requite your infant a heave past condign a meliorate babe-talker?

As noted in a higher place, that'south hard to prove on the basis of uncomplicated correlations between parents and babies. Parents who are actually good at IDS might be practiced at language in general. Nosotros can't dominion out the possibility that genetics plays a function in their children's evolution.

Simply the experiments we've considered prove that infant-directed speech helps listeners notice key features of spoken communication in the short-term. It makes sense to remember these features have a lasting, ongoing touch.

Moreover, nosotros've reason to think that the expressiveness of our linguistic communication helps capture a baby's attention, a crucial prerequisite for learning.

In one experiment on 4-calendar month-former infants, Peter Kaplan and his colleagues institute that babies could larn to acquaintance a photograph of an unfamiliar, grinning face with an unfamiliar voice speaking baby talk (Kaplan et al 2002). Just at that place was a catch:

When the speaker was a depressed woman, her infant-directed speech was flatter, more monotonic, and the babies failed to bear witness pregnant learning in the task.

Peter Kaplan and his colleagues conducted similar experiments more recently, and take establish agonizing links to postpartum low.

When they tested babies twice — at 4 months and 12 months — they establish that maternal depression at 4 months postpartum predicted later learning problem: 12-month-one-time babies failed to learn the new face-voice association, fifty-fifty if their mothers' mental health had improved (Kaplan et al 2012).

And then it seems that the quality of babe-directed speech can take an impact on the fashion babies learn, and that early exposure matters. Women suffering from postpartum low take even so another reason to seek handling and support.

It's also possible that the absence of expressive baby talk may contribute to speech delays in some toddlers. Studies suggest that some "late talkers"–divers as toddlers who reach the age of 2 years with fewer than 50 words in their vocabularies–haven't heard as much expressive babe-directed spoken communication as have normally-developing kids.

In particular, researchers have found that mothers of late talkers speak target words with a lower pitch than do mothers of ordinarily-developing kids (D'Odorico and Jacob 2006; Hampson and Nelson 1993).

Of grade, we should be careful interpreting such studies. Just because you lot take a belatedly talker doesn't mean you failed to provide your baby with the correct kind of baby talk!

But it seems there is aplenty evidence to show that infant-directed speech is helpful. I think we might consider it an of import facet of responsive, sensitive parenting during the first two years of life.

More data

For more information nigh the ways that young children learn speech, run across my manufactures about the effects of television on children's language skills and baby sign language.

In addition, y'all tin can read more about the attending-getting and emotional functions of infant-directed voice communication here.

And check out your baby's ability to "mind meld." Read my article, "Talking to babies: How friendly heart contact tin help babies tune in — and mirror your brain waves."

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References: How infant-directed speech helps babies learn to talk

Aslin RN, Woodward J, LaMendola Due north, and Bever TG. (1996). Models of word segmentation in fluent maternal speech to infants. In: J.L. Morgan & K. Demuth (eds.), Signal to Syntax . Mahwah, NJ: LEA (pp. 117-134).

de Boer, B. & Kuhl, P. M. (2003). Investigating the function of infant-directed speech with a computer model, Auditory Research LettersOn-Line (ARLO), 4, 129-134.

D'Odorico L and Jacob V. 2006. Prosodic and lexical aspects of maternal linguistic input to late-talking toddlers. Int J Lang Commun Disord. 41(3):293-311.

Fernald A and Mazzie 1991. Prosody and focus in spoken communication to infants and adults. Developmental Psychology 12(2): 209-221.

Fernald A, Pinto JP, Swingley D, Weinberg A, and McRoberts M. 1998. Rapid gains in speed of exact processing past infants in the second year. Psychological Science nine: 228-231.

Golinkoff RM and Alioto A. 1995. Infant-directed oral communication facilitates lexical learning in adults hearing Chinese : implications for linguistic communication conquering J Child Lang. 22(3):703-26.

Hampson J and Nelson Yard. 1993.The relation of maternal language to variation in rate and fashion of language acquisition. J Child Lang. 20(2):313-42.

Kaplan PS, Danko CM, Kalinka CJ, Cejka AM. 2012. A developmental reject in the learning-promoting furnishings of infant-directed speech for infants of mothers with chronically elevated symptoms of depression. Infant Behav Dev. 35(3):369-79.

Kaplan PS, Bachorowski J, Smoski MJ, and Hudenko WJ. 2002. Infants of depressed mothers, although competent learners, fail to learn in response to their own mother' baby-directed speech. Psychological Science 1393) 268-271.

Karzon RG. 1985. Discrimination of Polysyllabic Sequences by One- to Iv- Month-Former Infants. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 39(2): 326-42.

Kemler Nelson DG, Hirsh-Pasek Yard, Jusczyk PW, Cassidy KW. 1989. How the prosodic cues in motherese might assist language learning. J Kid Lang. xvi(1):55-68.

Kubicek C, Gervain J, Hillairet de Boisferon A, Pascalis O, Lœvenbruck H, and Schwarzer G. 2014. The influence of babe-directed spoken language on 12-calendar month-olds' intersensory perception of fluent spoken communication. Babe Behav Dev. 37(4):644-51.

Kuhl PK, Andruski JE, Chistovich IA, Chistovich LA, Kozhevnikova EV, Ryskina VL, Stolyarova EI, Sundberg U, and Lacerda F. 1997. Cantankerous-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. Science 277(5326):684-6.

Lloyd-Play tricks S, Széplaki-Köllőd B, Yin J, and Csibra G. 2015. Are you talking to me? Neural activations in six-month-former infants in response to beingness addressed during natural interactions. Cortex lxx:35-48.

Martin A, Schatz T, Versteegh M, Miyazawa Thousand, Mazuka R, Dupoux East, Cristia A. Mothers speak less conspicuously to infants than to adults: a comprehensive test of the hyperarticulation hypothesis. Psychol Sci. 26(3):341-7.

Masapollo G, Polka L, Ménard L. 2015. When infants talk, infants heed: pre-blathering infants prefer listening to speech with infant vocal properties. Dev Sci. 2022 Mar five. doi: 10.1111/desc.12298. [Epub ahead of impress]

Newman RS, Rowe ML, Bernstein Ratner N. 2015. Input and uptake at 7 months predicts toddler vocabulary: the role of child-directed speech and babe processing skills in linguistic communication development. J Child Lang. 24:1-sixteen.

Saffran JR, Aslin RN and Newport EL. 1996. Statistical learning by viii-month-quondam infants. Science 274: 1926-1928.

Thiessen ED, Hill EA and Saffran JR. 2005. Infant-directed speech facilitates give-and-take segmentation. Infancy ane(1): 53-71.

Uther M, and Knoll MA, and Burnham D. 2007. Exercise yous speak E-North-G-Fifty-I-South-H? A comparing of foreigner- and infant-directed speech. Voice communication communication 49: 2-vii.

Content last modified ten/2015

epitome of man with babe cropped from photograph byToshimasa Ishibashi/flickr

image of baby boy by Ludmila27/wikimedia commons

closeup of female parent and infant by Daniel Moustapha / wikimedia commons

paradigm of mother talking to baby by Steve Hildebrand / Us Fish and Wildlife

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