Baby Talk : Babies Learn To Talk By Hearing Baby Sounds New Research Confirms

Should You Use Baby Talk With Infants?

New Research from  Montreal confirms that young babies are more interested in the high-pitched sing song voices they hear, compared to normal adult speech levels parents and other adults naturally use when they are talking to young babies.  

Prof. Linda Polka of McGill's School of Communication Disorders and her team in the journal Developmental Science.Reasearcher says In the meantime, parents' intuitive knowledge to use a high, infant-like voice to speak to babies is "right on," 

The  experiments allowed babies to control a machine that gave out different levels of the sound "eeee" and babies showed they liked the high-pitched level better. But not only that, the researchers found that babies like to thear the voices of other babies. 

When the babies heard the high pitched sounds, they showed they preferred them and moved their mouths more.

In this video a 6 month old baby girl smiles and moves her mouth when hearing  a high-pitched "ee" sound. 

Using the high pitched " motherese" that comes naturally to adults has the effect of getting a baby's attention. And when you have  a baby's attention, the baby is learning, and his brain is developing.

So parents who mimic the way babies talk are giving their babies a head start in the process of speech development.

This confirms my own experience and supports the activities I describe in my e-book " How to Teach Babies to Talk" . It also shows that the mantra " don't talk baby talk to babies if you want them to learn to talk well" does not follow for babies under a year old. 

If you want to read more about how babies learn to talk and how to help them go to this page and read more articles of other research and what the parents who are already using the book have to say.

How to Teach Babies to Talk

The McGill University research was reported in a Science Daily press release