FACT or MYTH: Is babytalk doing more harm than good?

What is babytalk and why do we do it? Do all caregivers use babytalk? Is it harmful or does it help at all? Questions surrounding children’s language development were not simply raised by parents—developmental researchers have devoted their studies for decades to find answers to these questions. In acquiring a more holistic understanding of babytalk, we must dive into how adults truly speak to infants, what the kind of speech babies prefer to hear, and what it all means for their development.

There is a parenting speech style identified as infant-directed speech (IDS) categorized with intonation and rhythmic features such as higher pitch, wider pitch range, shorter utterances, and more repetitions than that of adult-directed speech (ADS) (Fernald & Simon, 1984). IDS is known as Motherese/Parentese, but it isn’t specific to mothers or parents (Golinkoff & Ames, 1979). To investigate the difference between IDS and ADS, Fernald & Mazzie (1991) observed mothers telling a story through a picture book to 14-month-old infants versus adults. They found that when speaking to infants, mothers typically have raised pitches when saying focus words such as the subject or verbs, which they usually place at the end of sentences. However, when the mothers were talking to adults, the emphasis on these words was less uniform. 

But do babies actually prefer IDS over ADS? Cooper & Aslin (1990) examined the speech preference of two-day-old newborns and one-month-old infants by observing if they looked at visual stimulus produced by IDS longer than stimulus produced by ADS. The study results showed that both groups of young infants preferred IDS over ADS, suggesting that IDS preference is present at birth and does not rely on postnatal experience with language. Other studies have also been conducted about speech preference across the first year of a child’s life. IDS preferences have also been observed among 4-month-olds (Fernald, 1985) and older infants, ages 12 and 16 months old (Segal & Newman, 2015). So, yes—babies do prefer IDS! 

One of the early arguments that sought to explain IDS preference during infancy is that IDS promotes positive emotional connection between the child and caregiver (Fernald, 1992). IDS features play a role in attracting and maintaining infant attention (Fernald, 1993; Papoušek & Papoušek, 1989), as its exaggerated nature provides a way for infants to easily identify a speaker’s emotion in IDS (positive affect) than in ADS (Singh, Morgan & Best, 2002). Furthermore, infants were observed to respond more and respond well to speech with prosodic features, which are features relating to rhythm and intonation, typical of IDS (Golinkoff et al., 2015; Fernald & Mazzie, 1991). Researchers believe that these prosodic features are important in keeping infants engaged during social and linguistic interactions. The more they hear words spoken to them, the more likely they are to learn them. Prosodic cues such as exaggerated pitch contours, vowel alterations, and word segmentation reveal structural properties that assist speech processing for infants who are still learning how to speak (Kuhl et al., 1992; Fernald, 1984; Papoušek & Papoušek, 1981). 

Babies may prefer listening to it but are there actual benefits to using IDS? Caregivers’ use of IDS is positively associated with better linguistic development outcomes during the child’s first two years of life (Spinelli et al., 2017). Successful word learning through IDS alone was found among infants ages 17 months (Graf Estes & Hurley, 2012) and 21 months old (Ma et al., 2011). One argument suggests that IDS was able to catch the babies’ attention more than ADS because IDS is a familiar mode of communication. It is believed that the infants were able to recognize novel words and associate the sounds with their meaning when hearing them with the exaggerated prosodic features of IDS. Though it was found that older infants (21-month-olds vs. 27-month-olds) were able to learn new words through ADS (Ma et al., 2011), it might be because, at that age, they are now familiar and more experienced with speech that is typically used with adults. Children learn to adapt a vocabulary that parallels their expanding knowledge of the world around them. 

Considering diverse realities, it is important to note that the studies in which these findings are extracted from are predominantly influenced by Western culture—one that is marked with an established cultural norm that encourages caregivers to constantly speak to their children. Not all cultures use IDS nor speak to their young infants (Cristia et al., 2019; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1983) in the same way as the participants in these existing studies. Therefore, generalizing these ideas to define a “proper” way to cultivate young minds, when it has only been observed to work in one cultural frame, is a significant misrepresentation of other cultures. Needless to say, simplified language modeled by “babytalk” should not also be deemed less advanced by adults, but instead be considered as a helpful tool to use for infants in building connections that will aid their language comprehension. So contrary to the myth, “babytalk” will not get in the way of your baby’s language skills. Try it and maybe, you’ll even get a good laugh and the cutest toothless smile from it.

References

Cooper, R.P. & Aslin, R.N. (1990). Preference for infant-directed in the first month after birth.Child Development, 61(5), 1584-1595. 

Cristia, A., Dupoux, E., Gurven, M., & Stieglitz, J. (2017). Child-directed speech is infrequent in a forager-farmer population: A time allocation study. Child Development, 90(3), 759-773. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12974 

Fernald, A., & Simon, T. (1984). Expanded intonation contours in mothers' speech to newborns. Developmental Psychology, 20(1), 104–113. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.20.1.104

Fernald, A. (1985). Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese. Infant Behavior and Development, 8, 181-195.

Fernald, A. (1989). Intonation and communicative intent in mothers’ speech to infants: is the melody the message? Child Development, 60(6), 1497-1510. https://doi.org/10.2307/1130938 

Fernald, A., & Mazzie, C. (1991). Prosody and focus in speech to infants and adults. Developmental Psychology, 27(2), 209–221. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.27.2.209

Fernald, A. (1992). Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals: An evolutionary perspective. The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, 391-428.

Fernald, A. (1993). Approval and disapproval: Infant responsiveness to vocal affect in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Child Development, 64(3), 657–674. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131209

Golinkoff, R. M., & Ames, G. J. (1979). A comparison of fathers' and mothers' speech with their young children. Child Development, 50(1), 28–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/1129037

Golinkoff, R. M., Can, D. D., Soderstrom, M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2015). (Baby)talk to me: The social context of infant-directed speech and its effects on early language acquisition. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(5), 339–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415595345

Graf Estes, K. & Hurley, K. (2012). Infant-directed prosody helps infants map sounds to meanings. Infancy, 18(5), 797-824. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12006 

Kuhl, P. K., Williams, K. A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K. N., & Lindblom, B. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. Science, 255(5044), 606–608. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1736364

Ma, W., Golinkoff, R.M., Houston, D.M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2011). Word learning in infant- and adult-directed speech. Language Learning and Development, 7(3), 185-201.  https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2011.579839 

Papoušek, M., & Papoušek, H. (1981). Musical elements in the infant's vocalization: Their significance for communication, cognition, and creativity. Advances in Infancy Research, 1, 163–224.

Papoušek, M., & Papoušek, H. (1989). Forms and functions of vocal matching in interactions between mothers and their precanonical infants. First Language, 9(6), 137-157. https://doi.org/10.1177/014272378900900603

Schieffelin, B.B. & Ochs, E. (1983). A cultural perspective on the transition form prelinguistic to linguistic communication. Cultural Worlds of Early Childhood, 48-63.

Segal, J. & Newman, R.S. (2015). Infant preferences for structural and prosodic of infant-directed speech in the second year of life. Infancy, 20(3), 339-351. 10.1111/infa.12077

Singh, L., Morgan, J. L., & Best, C. T. (2002). Infants' listening preferences: Baby talk or happy talk? Infancy, 3(3), 365–394. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327078IN0303_5

Spinelli, M., Fasolo, M., & Mesman, J. (2017). Does prosody make the difference? A meta-analysis on relations between prosodic aspects of infant-directed speech and infant outcomes. Developmental Review, 44, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2016.12.001