{"id":88017,"date":"2014-01-13T08:55:51","date_gmt":"2014-01-13T13:55:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=88017"},"modified":"2014-01-28T09:29:26","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T14:29:26","slug":"the-importance-of-baby-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2014\/01\/the-importance-of-baby-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"The Importance of Baby Talk"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Nair\u00e1n<\/a>
Nair\u00e1n Ram\u00edrez-Esparza, assistant professor of psychology, left, and Adri\u00e1n Garc\u00eda-Sierra, assistant research professor of psychology and speech, language, and hearing sciences. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It may sound like idle chatter, but when babies babble they are not just talking nonsense.<\/p>\n

According to UConn researcher Nair\u00e1n Ram\u00edrez-Esparza, an infant\u2019s babbling plays an important role in future language development. When that babbling is prompted by one-on-one interaction with a parent speaking \u2018parentese\u2019 \u2013 the exaggerated, animated baby talk style often used by mom and dad when talking to their little ones \u2013 the results predict heightened language acquisition skills.<\/p>\n

Ram\u00edrez-Esparza, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, and her colleagues Adri\u00e1n Garc\u00eda-Sierra, assistant research professor in UConn\u2019s Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, and Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington\u2019s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, collaborated on a study that showed the common wisdom imparted to new parents that the more words babies hear, the faster their vocabularies grow, may not be true.<\/p>\n

Their findings show that what actually spurs early language development isn\u2019t so much the quantity of words as the style of speech and social context in which that speech occurs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat our study shows is that how you talk to children matters,\u201d Ram\u00edrez-Esparza says, \u201cand the use of \u2018parentese\u2019 is much better at developing language than regular adult speech. It\u2019s even better if communication occurs during one-on-one interactions.\u201d<\/p>\n

What our study shows is that how you talk to children matters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The study showed that the more parents exaggerated vowels \u2013 for example, \u201cHow are youuuu?\u201d \u2013 and raised the pitch of their voices, the more the one-year-olds babbled. This turns out to be a forerunner of word production. Baby talk was most effective when a parent spoke with a child individually, without other adults or children around.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome parents produce baby talk naturally and they don\u2019t even realize they\u2019re benefiting their children,\u201d says Ram\u00edrez-Esparza. \u201cSome families are just quieter and they don\u2019t talk as much. But our study shows that it helps to make an effort to talk to infants as much as possible. Getting engaged and having the infant talk back \u2013 or babble \u2013 is really important.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A mother and toddler engage in one-on-one interaction. (iStock photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Parents can use baby talk when going about everyday activities, saying things like, \u201cWhere are your shoooes?\u201d or \u201cOh, this tastes gooood!\u201d \u2013 emphasizing important words and speaking slowly, using a happy tone of voice.<\/p>\n

Another way to assure heightened communication is by reading to infants and getting them involved in a story. \u2018The cow jumped over the moooon,\u2019 works, as does \u2018baby bear, baby bear, what do you seeee?\u2019 It\u2019s all a matter of keeping baby interested.<\/p>\n

The study involved 26 babies about one year of age who wore vests containing audio recorders that collected sounds from the children\u2019s auditory environment for eight hours a day for four days. The researchers used LENA (\u201clanguage environment analysis\u201d) software to examine 4,075 30-second intervals of recorded speech. Within those segments, the researchers identified who was talking in each segment, how many people were there, whether baby talk [parentese] or regular voice was used, and other variables.<\/p>\n

When the babies were two years old, parents filled out a questionnaire measuring how many words their children knew. Infants who had heard more baby talk knew more words. In the study, two-year-olds in families that spoke the most baby talk in a one-on-one social context knew 433 words, on average, compared with the 169 words recognized by two-year-olds in families who used the least baby talk in one-on-one situations.<\/p>\n

The relationship between baby talk and language development persisted across socioeconomic status, despite there only being 26 families in the study.<\/p>\n

The study, which was funded by a National Science Foundation Science of Learning Program, shows the importance of interaction and engagement around language. The overwhelming consensus is, the more you get a verbal serve-and-volley going, the more language advances. Detailed findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Developmental Science<\/i>.<\/p>\n

As to what is next on her agenda, Ram\u00edrez-Esparza, who joined the UConn faculty last fall from the University of Washington, says that a follow-up study will look at infants who are being raised in a bilingual [English and Spanish] environment.<\/p>\n

This study, in collaboration with Garc\u00eda-Sierra, will include brain measurements, and will investigate the intricacies of language development in bilingual children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UConn researchers have shown the importance of animated talk and undivided attention in an infant’s word acquisition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":88072,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2076,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[56],"class_list":["post-88017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-research","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-24 02:25:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88017"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88088,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88017\/revisions\/88088"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/88072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88017"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=88017"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=88017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}