Abstract The propensity to raise and vary the pitch of one's voice when addressing an infant or small child was investigated in a sample of 16 male and 16 female adults, half of whom were married with children and half of whom had never married and never had children. Fundamental frequency was assessed using a sound spectrograph. Mean fundamental frequency and average variability both increased significantly over baseline when subjects were asked to imagine speaking to an infant or small child and increased significantly again when an infant or a small child was actually present. Nonparents who had little prior experience with infants modified their fundamental frequency as much as parents. Sex of speaker was not significantly related to the modification of fundamental frequency when sex differences in range of modal frequency were held constant. These modifications in vocal frequency may be attributable either to a biologically based propensity in the adult speaker or to attentional feedback from the infant or small child. Show Journal Information As the flagship journal of the Society for Research in Child Development, Child Development has published articles, essays, reviews, and tutorials on various topics in the field of child development since 1930. Spanning many disciplines, the journal provides the latest research, not only for researchers and theoreticians, but also for child psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, psychiatric social workers, specialists in early childhood education, educational psychologists, special education teachers, and other researchers. Publisher Information Wiley is a global provider of content and content-enabled workflow solutions in areas of scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly research; professional development; and education. 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Wiley has partnerships with many of the world’s leading societies and publishes over 1,500 peer-reviewed journals and 1,500+ new books annually in print and online, as well as databases, major reference works and laboratory protocols in STMS subjects. With a growing open access offering, Wiley is committed to the widest possible dissemination of and access to the content we publish and supports all sustainable models of access. Our online platform, Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) is one of the world’s most extensive multidisciplinary collections of online resources, covering life, health, social and physical sciences, and humanities. News releases | Research | Social science January 6, 2014 Common advice to new parents is that the more words babies hear the faster their vocabulary grows. Now new findings show that what spurs early language development isn’t so much the quantity of words as the style of speech and social context in which speech occurs. Researchers at the University of Washington and University of Connecticut examined thousands of 30-second snippets of verbal exchanges between parents and babies. They measured parents’ use of a regular speaking voice versus an exaggerated, animated baby talk style, and whether speech occurred one-on-one between parent and child or in group settings. “What our analysis shows is that the prevalence of baby talk in one-on-one conversations with children is linked to better language development, both concurrent and future,” said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. The more parents exaggerated vowels – for example “How are youuuuu?” – and raised the pitch of their voices, the more the 1-year olds babbled, which is a forerunner of word production. Baby talk was most effective when a parent spoke with a child individually, without other adults or children around. Listen to a mother use baby talk with her child: “The fact that the infant’s babbling itself plays a role in future language development shows how important the interchange between parent and child is,” Kuhl said. The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Developmental Science. Twenty-six babies about 1 year of age wore vests containing audio recorders that collected sounds from the children’s auditory environment for eight hours a day for four days. The researchers used LENA (“language environment analysis”) software to examine 4,075 30-second intervals of recorded speech. Within those segments, the researchers identified who was talking in each segment, how many people were there, whether baby talk – also known as “parentese” – or regular voice was used, and other variables. When the babies were 2 years old, parents filled out a questionnaire measuring how many words their children knew. Infants who had heard more baby talk knew more words. In the study, 2-year olds in families who spoke the most baby talk in a one-on-one social context knew 433 words, on average, compared with the 169 words recognized by 2-year olds in families who used the least babytalk in one-on-one situations. The relationship between baby talk and language development persisted across socioeconomic status and despite there only being 26 families in the study. “Some parents produce baby talk naturally and they don’t realize they’re benefiting their children,” said first author Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Connecticut. “Some families are more quiet, not talking all the time. But it helps to make an effort to talk more.” Previous studies have focused on the amount of language babies hear, without considering the social context. The new study shows that quality, not quantity, is what matters. “What this study is adding is that how you talk to children matters. Parentese is much better at developing language than regular speech, and even better if it occurs in a one-on-one interaction,” Ramirez-Esparza said. Parents can use baby talk when going about everyday activities, saying things like, “Where are your shoooes?,” “Let’s change your diiiiaper,” and “Oh, this tastes goooood!,” emphasizing important words and speaking slowly using a happy tone of voice. “It’s not just talk, talk, talk at the child,” said Kuhl. “It’s more important to work toward interaction and engagement around language. You want to engage the infant and get the baby to babble back. The more you get that serve and volley going, the more language advances.” A National Science Foundation Science of Learning Program to the UW-hosted LIFE Center funded the study. ### For more information, contact Kuhl at 206-685-1921 or or Ramírez-Esparza 860-486-6365 or . Tag(s): I-LABS How do adults talk to babies?Baby Talk: Talk Often to Your Baby
Babies learn to speak by imitating the sounds they hear around them. So the more you talk to your baby, the faster they will acquire speech and language skills. Many adults use a special tone of voice when talking baby talk -- a high-pitched voice with exaggerated expression.
Is infantInfant directed speech (IDS) is a speech register characterized by simpler sentences, a slower rate, and more variable prosody. Recent work has implicated it in more subtle aspects of language development.
How talking in higher pitch can help infant into direct speech?A new study suggests that when parents baby talk to their infants, they might be helping them learn to produce speech. The way we instinctively speak to babies — higher pitch, slower speed, exaggerated pronunciation — not only appeals to them, but likely helps them learn to understand what we're saying.
When speaking to infants caregivers typically have a higher pitched speech style with wider fluctuations in intonation called?Parentese is a speech style that is characterized by higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation contours (Fernald, 1985; Grieser and Kuhl, 1988).
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