Perspective: Before I had kids, I vowed never to use baby talk. Here’s why I was wrong.
By Rosemary Counter April 25 at 9:00 AM Before our daughter was born, my husband and I agreed on this one most-important parenting rule: There would be no ridiculous baby talk at our house. No goo-goos or ga-gas, no little socksies on little footsies, and absolutely no cwuddles after squaarrry dweams.
In just a few sleepy months of intense immersion, I mastered the inflections, intonation, grammar and vocabulary of what many linguists consider a language proper. Whatever you call it, Motherese sounds the same, and you already know it: “There’s a higher pitch, more variability in tones and a whole lot of repetition,” says linguist Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of “The Scientist in the Crib.” “Vowels get further apart, which just means acoustic exaggeration,” Kuhl says.
Sometimes, in my responses, my daughter would declare me the meanest mom in the world. Other times, I’d have her say words of reassurance and appreciation exactly when I needed them most: “Mommy, has anyone told you you make the best powdered oatmeal in town?” But if you find yourself a parent, it can, it probably will and it definitely should happen. “Research shows that Parentese itself predicts future language, so we want parents to talk more and to talk specifically in Parentese,” Kuhl says. “Mostly this is an unconscious thing, but we want it to be a conscious thing.”
It’s been said among speech therapists and other pediatric specialists that a baby needs to hear a word at least 500 times, in context, before they will start saying it. If pointing to a banana and slowly saying “ba-na-na” 500 times is a tedious thought, don’t think about it; instead, just narrate what you’re seeing and doing in humiliating third person .
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