Baby Talk
Read about being a mother of 12 as our resident 'Supermom'
shares her wise parenting advice.
A different kind of voice
I know plenty of people who refuse, on principal, to speak baby talk to
their babies. All I can tell you is that I have 12 children, and I never once
considered that baby talk might be somehow injurious to my children's ability
to learn proper language skills. In fact, it just seemed natural to adopt a
different kind of voice for the little ones.
That's why I was pleased to see a study on the subject by researchers at
Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh, where psychologist Erik Thiessen
found that infant-directed baby talk helps babies learn to speak faster than hearing
normal adult speech. Thiessen and his team of researchers had 8 month old
babies listen to fluent speech made up of nonsense words, then assessed how
many words they had learned after less than two minutes. The infants who heard
the nonsense words spoken with the exaggerated cadence typical of baby talk
learned language faster than those who heard normal adult speech spoken in more
of a monotone.
It's something that adults have always done with babies and if we stop
to think about it, it makes a lot of sense to use infant directed (ID) speech.
ID is slower, has longer pauses, is spoken in a higher frequency, has more
variation in pitch, simplified sentence structure and contains repeated
intonations. Of course this is helping our young'uns to learn to speak! ID is
tailor made for teaching language.
The natural way to teach
babies
In fact, when an adult wants to learn a foreign language, he will be
more successful when there is repetition, variation in pitch, simplified
sentence structure. He'll catch on faster when he is spoken to at a slower rate
and with more pauses. Doing what comes naturally is the natural way to teach
babies or adults to learn a language.
The nature of baby talk is such that it breaks up sentences into parts,
helping babies to understand where syllables, words, and sentences start and
end. This is called segmentation. When we speak to our babies in ID we are
teaching them all about the structure of spoken language.
We knew it all along
But some researchers are focusing on other aspects of baby talk. One study
suggests that baby talk is part of the emotional bonding process. Of course, we
knew this already, without having to resort to fancy experiments. Saying,
"Goo goo, ga ga," makes a baby's mouth melt into a smile. We knew
that all along.
For more information on speech and your baby check out our baby development videos.
I know plenty of people who refuse, on principal, to speak baby talk to
their babies. All I can tell you is that I have 12 children, and I never once
considered that baby talk might be somehow injurious to my children's ability
to learn proper language skills. In fact, it just seemed natural to adopt a
different kind of voice for the little ones.
That's why I was pleased to see a study on the subject by researchers at
Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh, where psychologist Erik Thiessen
found that infant-directed baby talk helps babies learn to speak faster than hearing
normal adult speech. Thiessen and his team of researchers had 8 month old
babies listen to fluent speech made up of nonsense words, then assessed how
many words they had learned after less than two minutes. The infants who heard
the nonsense words spoken with the exaggerated cadence typical of baby talk
learned language faster than those who heard normal adult speech spoken in more
of a monotone.
It's something that adults have always done with babies and if we stop
to think about it, it makes a lot of sense to use infant directed (ID) speech.
ID is slower, has longer pauses, is spoken in a higher frequency, has more
variation in pitch, simplified sentence structure and contains repeated
intonations. Of course this is helping our young'uns to learn to speak! ID is
tailor made for teaching language.
The natural way to teach
babies
In fact, when an adult wants to learn a foreign language, he will be
more successful when there is repetition, variation in pitch, simplified
sentence structure. He'll catch on faster when he is spoken to at a slower rate
and with more pauses. Doing what comes naturally is the natural way to teach
babies or adults to learn a language.
The nature of baby talk is such that it breaks up sentences into parts,
helping babies to understand where syllables, words, and sentences start and
end. This is called segmentation. When we speak to our babies in ID we are
teaching them all about the structure of spoken language.
We knew it all along
But some researchers are focusing on other aspects of baby talk. One study
suggests that baby talk is part of the emotional bonding process. Of course, we
knew this already, without having to resort to fancy experiments. Saying,
"Goo goo, ga ga," makes a baby's mouth melt into a smile. We knew
that all along.
For more information on speech and your baby check out our baby development videos.
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