How should we talk to babies?
The recent happy news that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expecting a baby in the spring means there will soon be five young children in the royal inner circle. No doubt, like parents everywhere, Harry and Meghan will want their newborn to acquire the best language skills possible.
Until the Seventies, it was assumed that infants’ language development was preprogrammed, that it simply “unfolded” as they grew. However, following accounts of children raised in conditions of dreadful deprivation, including social isolation, it became clear that the way parents talk to children is crucial.
Therefore, beginning in the late Sixties, a number of child psychologists began recording mothers talking to their young children, and the transcripts revealed a number of specific features in the adults’ speech – including heightened pitch, exaggerated intonation and increased repetition of words and clauses.
At first, this style was referred to as “motherese”, but it was soon changed to infant-directed speech (IDS), because it became clear that almost everyone – adults, teenagers and, according to Judy Dunn and Carol Kendrick at the University of Cambridge, even children as young as two years old – modify what they say in similar ways when they speak to the very young.
IDS is characterised by short, simple statements, with long pauses. The speaker repeats what they’ve said frequently, and asks lots of questions. They speak more slowly than usual and at a higher pitch. Studies have shown this happens across all languages, even tonal ones such as Mandarin. The intentions, it seems, are to show affection while at the same time maximise the chance of being understood.
Surprisingly, we don’t need to be taught how to speak in this manner. It seems to come naturally; in fact, researchers note that participants switch into IDS almost automatically when they meet a young child.
As if in beautiful synchrony, babies are hard-wired to pay special attention to this perfectly adapted speech. Yu Saito and colleagues at Hiroshima University measured cerebral blood flow change in four-week-old neonates. Even at that young age, babies showed increased brain function (evidence of greater attention) when they heard IDS compared to when they heard ADS (adultdirected speech) – even while sleeping.
But could we speed things up? What if, instead of the automatic switch to IDS, we try instead to “help” children learn to speak properly by correcting their mistakes? Courtney Cazden at Harvard asked some mothers to correct their pre-schoolers when they made grammatical errors, and asked others simply to respond to what they thought their child was trying to tell them.
Children in the latter group acquired language more quickly and had better grammar than those who’d had their errors pointed out and corrected.
The evidence is overwhelming. The best way to help children acquire excellent language skills is to talk with them, read them stories and poems, sing to them – in other words, to share as many good examples of language as possible, as often as possible.