[Update November 4]: New research on babies and language development in the journal Pediatrics suggests dads may need to speak up. The study found that mothers chat with their infants more than fathers do from birth to seven months, and that those infants were also more likely to respond to their moms’ voices. Another interesting fact: Moms in the study tended to respond more frequently to their infant girls’ babble. The takeaway: All babies benefit from exposure to conversation and should hear from both parents as much as possible.
Get within six feet of a small child, and most people can feel it welling up from within: those coos. That annoying singsong lilt. The exaggerated vowels and repetitive sounds. Across cultures, baby talk is almost impossible to avoid. But is it actually helping babies and young toddlers learn to speak" It turns out, yes. Not only does the slow, exaggerated sound of ?parentese? hold the attention of toddlers, but it also gives them clues on how to decode a sentence, build a vocabulary and more. There is a caveat, however: words like ?num-num? and ?ittle-widdle? aren?t known to help much at all.
Katherine White, a professor of developmental psychology, studies those early stages of language at the Lab for Infant Development and Language at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. She says parentese is found in almost all languages?even sign language?but the impetus seems to be less about teaching speech than simply holding a baby...