How to talk to babies

Babies have a way with us. We stare unabashedly at them and smile and make silly faces. Our speech changes, too. Baby talk, known among researchers asinfant-directed speech, motherese, and parentese (as fathers are not immune), is well—even exhaustively—studied.

When we talk to babies, we tend to use shorter, simpler sentences, which we utter more slowly. Our pitch becomes higher and more variable, our affect warmer, and our vowels more exaggerated. “Oh suuuch a niiice baaaby!” we coo. And by “we,” I mean just about everyone everywhere; baby talk exists, in a (somewhat) similar form, in every language in which it has been studied.

So why do we do this? For one, infants like baby talk. Pretty much from the get-go they’ll listen to it longer than they’ll listen to speech directed toward adults. 

Baby talk is also a particularly efficient conduit of speakers’ emotions and intentions. All speech transmits this information to some degree; a non-English speaker can nonetheless listen to an English speaker’s words and do a decent job of deciding whether they’re listening to chastisement, approval, comfort-giving, or attention-seeking. But present that non-English speaker with English baby talk and she’ll do an even better job. Baby talk, with its theatrical sing-songedness, wears its heart on its sleeve.

Finally, and slightly more controversially, baby talk may actually help infants learn their native language. 

So is baby talk a happy accident, or a smart parenting strategy developed over the ages? 

We may never know exactly how it came to be, but we do know that we speak differently to babies, to whom we hope to teach language, than to our pets, whom we just hope to house-train. When talking to pets, we do not hyper-articulate our vowels. No matter how clearly we sound our vowels, we know in our heart of hearts that our cat will remain stubbornly ignorant of the intricacies of the English language.

Here are some tips for talking to your baby:

• Look at your baby's eyes while you are talking to her.
• Call your baby by her name.
• Keep your talk simple. Say "pretty baby." Use the words "mommy" and "daddy" when you talk to her.
• Watch for your baby's expressions and listen to her sounds. Make these same sounds and facial expressions back to her.
• Add gestures to your talk. Say "wave bye-bye to the dog" as you wave to the dog.
• Ask your baby questions. "Would Maria like to have her milk now?" "Does Maria want to go outside?" Ask the questions even though she can't answer.
• Talk about what you are doing. As you dress, bathe and change your baby, talk about what you're doing.
• Read to your baby. Babies love nursery rhymes and poems. You can even use a lively voice and read your favorite magazine or book to her. If you can, use books with stories that include a baby, a rattle or other common things. (You can find lots of children's books at your public library.)
• Sing to your baby. It is important while she begins to learn language skills.
• Watch for signals from your baby when you are talking to her. If she is smiling and keeping eye contact, she is saying she wants you to keep on talking.