Baby talk is a phenomenon that crosses racial, cultural, and gender lines. It’s virtually impossible for most of us to look at a baby and not descend into the silly blubber of baby talk. Formerly intelligent English majors will find themselves saying things like “Who’s a widdle pookie-wookie?” Big manly men speak in tiny, non-threatening voices. Baby talk is universal, and considering the nonsensicalness of how adults talk to children, it’s somewhat amazing that anyone ever learns proper English at all. So why do we do it?
Speaking Like a Mom
Sometimes baby talk is called “motherese” or “mommy talk,” but linguists and child development experts properly refer to it as child-directed speech, and it’s a particular form of language that humans use when talking to infants and children. Adults descend into baby talk regardless of whether they are parents themselves, whether it’s babbling incoherently or just a slight change in pitch. Whenever we’re confronted with an infant or small child our voices pitch up, we speak with a comforting “cooing” sound, and we shorten and simplify words. “Father” becomes “da-da,” “blanket” becomes “binky,” and “bottle” becomes “ba-ba.”
Many languages contain their own version of baby talk. Across the world, baby talk vocabularies are mostly comprised of words that deal with sleeping, eating, elimination, animals, relatives, and behavior. Besides speech, adults also use exaggerated facial expressions and physical gestures when communicating with young children. Even animals like chimps use a special set of vocalizations specifically directed at their young.
Learning Language, One Sound at a Time
Infants’ brains develop rapidly in the first few years of life, and they learn to speak by mimicking adults. Babies babble and make nonsense noises until about fifteen months of age, when they start saying actual words and understanding their meaning. (Although some infants speak earlier and some speak later.) At about age three, children’s language abilities increase exponentially, and they should be able to form simple sentences as well as understand things that adults say to them.
Adults’ role in their children’s language development is to exaggerate words and sounds so that babies can understand them better. What sounds like a dumbing-down of the language is a valuable simplification that allows infants to start learning and understanding how to communicate. Even before they can speak, adults talk to infants and demonstrate that language is bidirectional; one person speaks, followed by the other. Even if all the baby can do is babble or laugh, they learn to respond to adults’ speech. The high pitch and the simple sounds of baby talk are pleasing to babies’ ears, and we tend to focus on easy consonants like “b,” “m,” and “p,” since those sounds are easy for babies to imitate, and tend to be among the first sounds they produce. Studies at Stanford University in the eighties showed that given a choice between baby talk and regular adult conversation, infants prefer to listen to baby talk.
Babies listen to adults speak in order to develop their own language capacities, so for many years, some childcare experts have theorized that not using baby talk could speed up the process. An article from the The New York Times in 1914 asks, “If we insist on talking baby talk to them, where will they get their model and inspiration to talk correctly?” Although modern linguists don’t fear that children might grow up speaking baby talk for the rest of their lives, many have wondered whether infantilizing the language is necessary for children to learn. Most research, however, has supported baby talk as an important key to child language development. A 2005 study at Carnegie Mellon University showed that child-directed speech helped babies learn words more quickly than regular adult speech. The study theorized that baby talk’s simplifications, along with the accompanying facial expressions and vocal cadences, help kids hook into language faster and more easily than speaking to them in adult terms.
