High-pitched talking beneficial to infants

Imagine a three-month-old baby girl in her crib. The majority of onlookers might be tempted… Imagine a three-month-old baby girl in her crib. The majority of onlookers might be tempted to talk to her differently than they would speak to each other.

If communication were to occur between the adult and infant, it would most likely take on the form of a high-pitched sound. The vowels are enunciated and sentences are elongated with longer pauses between each new phrase.

This rudimentary form of language is called infant-directed speech. More commonly, this phenomenon is known as baby talk. Other names include motherese and parentese.

Baby talk is very distinct in sound, tone and pitch. This particular speech takes on a glissando effect, meaning the adult’s pitch slides up and down throughout the sentence.

There are many factors that contribute to this subconscious baby talk.

First, the minute size of the infant forces adults to make their voices more appropriately leveled to such size. The normal bellow that adults produce would be too intimidating for such a small person, so instinctively, their usual voices are softened to compensate.

Secondly, those communicating with an infant want to catch the baby’s attention, and the more comforting tone of baby talk draws the child in.

Emie Tittnich, infant mental health specialist for Early HeadStart at Pitt, voiced her opinion on the reason why baby talk occurs so often.

“There’s a better match of frequency that the infant hears when spoken to in a higher pitch. We therefore get a more engaged response from the child and continue to use the same tone in the future,” she said.

Besides the enjoyment others gain by watching some creepy man cooing to a baby in the corner, there are other, more long-lasting benefits of baby talk.

The verbal stimulation that baby talk endorses makes language easier to learn for the child. Baby talk is consequentially simpler to follow for the baby because of its melodic tone; therefore, he can process more of the incoming verbalizations.

Interestingly enough, adults take the instinctual baby talk and associate it with animals as well. It is hard to deny a kitten the same soothing voice one would automatically give to a child.

The thought process behind communicating to infants through baby talk is displaced onto animals. There is a habitual action adults undergo that associates such an articulated speech process with those not on the same learning curve.

“Infants and young children perceptually ‘map’ critical aspects of ambient language in the early years of life, resulting in perceptual strategies and corresponding neural networks that are increasingly dedicated to the processing of a single language,” Patricia K. Kuhl, from the National Institutes of Health, said

Whatever one’s relationship to an infant may be, baby talk not only helps with the child’s language and communication development, but the onlookers will get quite a kick out of hearing others do it as well.