For ages mothers have been using baby talk with their children. And yet many a times they have been advised by ople not to use baby talk as it may lead to delay in learning how to speak a language. Now research shows that mothers have been right all along!
In an article in the journal Infancy, researchers Erik D. Thiessen and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff had said that baby talk and the body language used gets the attention of the child and actually helps him grasp the language faster than listening to normal adult talk.Baby talk or infant directed (ID) speech helps in distinguishing the words from fluent speech. In the experiments conducted by the researchers infants were able to distinguish words from nonsense sentences after exposure to infant directed speech, but not after hearing the same in adult way of talking.
The researchers are of the opinion that by learning to recognize words in the infant directed speech; babies have a better chance of learning the language much faster than babies who only have to listen to adult directed speech. An adult directed speech is in general spoken in a monotone and with longer sentences that babies may have difficulty in following.
Reference:
http://infancyarchives.com/Contents/Infancy7_1/7_1_5/7_1_5.htm
