As mentioned above, baby talk is characterized by slower and more repetitive tone than used in regular conversation and the speech is more likely in shorter, simpler utterances.
Do infants pay greater attention to speech with such characteristics? The answer appears to be yes: They show a clear preference for it, from an early age, over adult-directed speech (e.g., Fernald 1985; Panneton Cooper & Aslin 1990; Werker, Pegg, & McLeod 1994; see also Zangl & Mills 2007). .Infants appear to be more attentive to very high pitch in speech, and the younger they are, the more attentive they are (Werker & McLeod 1989). using basic “baby talk” may support babies in picking up words faster because they pay more attention when parents …show more content…
Reduplication can probably be regardedas a feature of baby talk throughoutthe world.
Not only are there apparent universals in production, but there is strong evidence that infants everywhere have a complementary response bias. Infants generally prefer to listen to infant speech over adult speech regardless of the gender of the voice (e.g., Werker & McLeod, 1989)
However, according to Clark (2009) social class may interfere in the way parents talk to their infants: Family size may affect the language experiences of children. Adults in crowded homes spoke to their children in simpler, less sophisticated, ways than adults in less-crowded homes. And adults in the more crowded settings were less responsive verbally to their children.
By age, first-born children were more advanced in lexical and grammatical development than later-born children; but later-born children were more advanced in conversational skills (see also Huttenlocher et al. 1991).
Conclusion
Baby talk is a simplified speech register having special lexical items and constructions, but it is mostly identified by its distinctive paralinguistic