Have you noticed how we shift our tone and attitude when we speak to babies?
Our vocabulary even changes!
Although my daughters are teenagers now, I am always amused at how adults’ intonations become totally ingratiating.
To be honest sometimes it can sound quite nauseating and I am a mum. So imagine what it is like for non-parents?
The reason why this comes to mind is that the other day while waiting for my daughters to come out of dance class, a mother’s pitch became so raised and her talk so babiesh when communicating with her toddler that I had to move and find another place to read my book.
Then I thought to myself, surely I was not like that with my own children, was I?
“We generally refer to this shift in tone, syntax and attitude as ‘baby talk’. It’s something that we expect in that particular interaction, so much so that an adult who approaches a newborn with serious demeanour would be regarded as insensitive to children!” says clinical psychologist and Harvard Medical School teacher Dr Lawrence Kutner.
“Yet those words have no less meaning to the baby than a more socially acceptable statement like, ‘Oh, what a cute little tummy you have!’”
One compelling theory is that we talk to babies this way not so much for their sake, but for our own.
“By shifting our patterns of speech we are acknowledging our special relationship with babies,” says Dr Kutner.
“The real purpose (and benefit) of baby talk is to bolster the social interaction between parent and child. Shifting our style of speech forces us to pay more attention to what we say and, therefore, to the person we’re talking to.”
So in effect the topic and details of the conversation do not matter much. It is the emotions and the extra attention that convey the most important message to the child and adult.
Parents have long thought that the best way to communicate with their young child is through baby talk.
Speaking more slowly, using a sing-song voice and using strange words may not, in fact, be the best way to communicate with your child, researchers have revealed.
The findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, found that mothers may actually speak less clearly to their infants than they do to adults.
The researchers first recorded 22 Japanese mothers talking to their children (ages 18 to 24 months) and an experimenter.
A team of experts at the Laboratory for Language Development at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Tokyo then spent five years annotating the 14 hours of speech, marking specific aspects of the speech including the beginnings and ends of consonants, vowels, phrases.
‘To our knowledge, this is one of the most finely annotated large corpora of child-directed speech in the world,’ say researchers, who applied a technique they had developed to measure the acoustic similarity between any two syllables, like ‘pa’ and ‘ba’, ‘po’ and ‘bo’.
Because the analysis is automated, the international team was able to examine the 118 most frequent syllable contrasts in both the adult- and child-directed speech.
The results were surprising: Mothers spoke slightly less clearly when talking to their child than to the experimenter.
“This finding is important because it challenges the widespread view that parents do and should hyperarticulate, using very robust data and an analysis based on a study of 10 times as many syllable contrasts as previous work,” says Alejandrina Cristia, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.
So basically, researchers are saying parents should just speak clearly.
My husband may get to read this and say ‘told you so’ as he never baby talked to the girls ...ever and often looked at me strangely when I did!
So here it goes ... you were right.