4 Child Directed Speech
Speech directed at children – Child Directed Speech (CDS) or Infant Directed Speech (IDS) with younger children – is often significantly different from Adult Directed Speech (ADS).
Activity 2 How is CDS different and how does it help learning?
In the box below write below three ways in which you think CDS is different from ADS.
Discussion
Research shows that relative to ADS, CDS tends to use a smaller range of words that are more likely to be delivered in isolation, with slower speech, higher pitch and a more variable intonation. Some researchers use the more general term Child Directed Communication (CDC), because adults also modify their gestures, facial expressions and body stance when addressing children in a way that supports their learning (Goldin-Meadow, 2009).
In the box below write below three ways in which you think CDS might help children learn language.
Discussion
In CDS adults are adapting and tuning their speech to infants’ general level of linguistic and cognitive competence. So, reducing utterance length, simplifying vocabulary and using isolated words makes comprehension easier. Talking with a higher and more variable pitch and exaggerated articulation may help to get young children’s attention, communicate emotional qualities and to direct their behaviour in various ways, at least more so than Adult Directed Speech.
Some properties of CDS, such as the exaggerated prosody, emotional variation and the tendency to put target words at the end of utterances have been shown to help pre-linguistic infants segment speech into clausal units by highlighting phrase boundaries. When addressing children, caregivers tend to place novel, to-be-learned information in utterance-final position (Aslin, Woodward, LaMendola and Bever, 1996), and experimental studies have shown 6-month-olds are more sensitive to information in this position than when it is placed at the end of the utterance (Johnson, Seidl and Tyler, 2014).
Not all of these characteristics of CDS are present in all languages. For example, Kipsigis-speaking mothers, from Kokwet Kenya, believe that children learn to talk more by listening to other children than from parents, and consequently talk less to their 2- and 3-year-old children compared with American mothers (Super and Harkness, 1986). Children learning Tsotsil Mayan are thought to receive as much language from other adults and children as from their own parents (de León and Sierra, 2024) and Tzeltal-learning infants who are rarely directly spoken to nevertheless understand many words, as well as knowledge of greeting terms they could only learn through overhearing (Foushee and Srinivasan, 2024).
When children grow up in multi-language environments, CDS will often contain a blend of different languages within one conversation, a phenomenon known as code switching. Children are likely to hear switches, both between sentences (e.g. Let’s read a book. Je vais lire un livre. [I’m going to read a book.]), and within sentences (e.g. I’m going to read un livre [a book]). The extent and type of code switching a child uses is related to the languages they are learning, the age at which the child begins hearing each language (simultaneously learning multiple languages from birth or learning one then another), the wider social context of family, community and education and the relative dominance in the input of each language they are learning. Typically, the balance between each language is not equal in terms of quantity (e.g. raw amount of use) or context of use (e.g. one language is more likely to be used at home than another).
Children are motivated to code switch because (a) many parents of bilingual children are bilingual themselves, and children are simply doing what they hear adults around them do (Comeau, Genesee and Lapaquette, 2003), and (b) when children do not know or cannot quickly retrieve the appropriate word in one language, they might borrow the word from the other language (Lanza, 2004). Thus, rather than being seen as a sign of confusion, code switching is better understood as the children taking the path of least resistance in conversations with others and a sign of their linguistic ingenuity (Byers-Heinlein and Lew-Williams, 2013).
In this video made by researchers from University of Connecticut’s HELLO Lab, they show how CDS helps babies tune in, pay attention, and even start building vocabulary faster. You’ll also see how this ‘baby talk’ style happens all over the world, from English to Japanese to Spanish-speaking families.
Transcript: Video 3 Is baby talk bad for my baby’s language development?
SPEAKER 1: Say hi. Hi to all the people. Hi to all the nice people. Yeah, you like all the people. Yeah.
SPEAKER 2: Hello, curious parents. Welcome to University of Connecticut’s Hello Lab Presents, a channel all about language and development. If you’re a parent with a baby or toddler at home, you probably have a ton of questions about how they best learn to communicate with others.
SPEAKER 3: Ooh, there we go. Can you try again? There you go. You got the lid off.
SPEAKER 2: Questions like, Am I talking to my baby enough, and what should I talk to my baby about? are super important. For our first ever episode, let’s tackle a related question. How should I talk with my baby?
[THEME MUSIC]
[BABY BABBLES]
SPEAKER 2: At some point, it’s likely that family members, friends, or even doctors have warned you against using so-called baby talk. Baby talk is a scientifically backed language booster for your baby.
SPEAKER 4: Are you shy now? [CHUCKLES]
[BABY BABBLES]
Yeah?
[BABY BABBLES]
SPEAKER 2: It goes by a lot of names, like motherese or parentese or even infant-directed speech. We can think of baby talk as a special way of talking to babies that both adults and even kids do without having to think about it. And I bet you already know what this playful, singsongy form of speech sounds and looks like. Just imagine you’re having a baby chat right now. You’d probably raise your pitch--
SPEAKER 5: Good morning, little woombie princess. Did you have sweet dreams?
SPEAKER 2: --slow things down--
SPEAKER 6: You’re learning how to--
[BABY BABBLES]
--find your voice and have other sounds other than crying? Yeah.
SPEAKER 2: --keep it simple and use short sentences.
SPEAKER 7: What did I find? What are those?
SPEAKER 8: Leaves.
SPEAKER 7: Leaves. That’s right.
SPEAKER 8: Thank you.
SPEAKER 7: You’re welcome.
SPEAKER 2: This way of talking to your kid sometimes gets a bad rap because many believe that it will somehow mess up how a kid learns language, especially doing things like imitating baby sounds like goo-goo gah-gah, using cutesy words like wah-wa instead of water, or put on your shoesies instead of put on your shoes. But there’s no proof for that. Babies are actually really good at learning different words for the same things. For more on that, check out our next episode on bilingualism.
SPEAKER 9: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Stick out your tongue.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
This is my favourite. Don’t let me down, OK? Ready?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Oh my lanta.
SPEAKER 2: It’s important to emphasise that there’s no scientific evidence that any aspect of baby talk is bad for your little one. In fact, there’s tons of evidence that baby talk is actually really beneficial. How so? Baby talk might let your baby know you’re talking to them and that they need to really turn on their listening ears. Evidence also shows babies pay more attention to baby talk compared to normal adult-directed speech.
SPEAKER 10: [BABY-TALKING] Hey, baby. Yeah, it’s so funny. Is that funny?
SPEAKER 2: While we’re still exploring this idea, baby talk might play a key role in making language easier to process for babies. It helps them recognise new words, grow their vocabulary, and learn grammar. And evidence shows this happening with both typically hearing babies and those who are deaf and hard of hearing, such as little ones with cochlear implants. More on childhood hearing considerations in a future episode. And we also know that it exists in some form or another across the world. That’s right. Babies all over the globe love baby talk.
SPEAKER 11: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
SPEAKER 12: [BABY-TALKING]
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
SPEAKER 13: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
SPEAKER 14: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
SPEAKER 2: And the benefits of baby talk go well beyond just language learning. Using it makes babies calmer, happier, and it’s important for forming social bonds.
SPEAKER 15: Don’t do that here. You know what I’m saying? Yeah.
[BABY BABBLES]
Yeah, yeah.
[BABY BABBLES]
Really? I thought the same thing.
SPEAKER 2: This is great stuff, but it’s important we point out what baby talk isn’t. This special way of talking to your baby doesn’t mean that you’re speaking unnaturally and ungrammatically. This is not something that’s recommended. Of course, as your kid grows, the way you talk to them should too.
[BABY BABBLES]
SPEAKER 16: I didn’t do anything.
[BABY BABBLES]
SPEAKER 2: Baby talk isn’t forever. It isn’t meant to be. And of course, the bigger a baby’s brain, the more language they can handle.
SPEAKER 17: But what time did that happen?
[BABY BABBLES]
How could you let this happen?
[BABY BABBLES]
SPEAKER 2: Bottom line, whether you call it baby talk or parentese, your baby learns language by interacting with you. So if this involves a few goo-goo gah-gahs, it’s more than likely to help boost, not hinder, their language growth. Just remember not to do all the talking. It’s important to give your little ones time to respond to what you’re saying too. Until next time.
SPEAKER 15: Oh, that’s crazy.
[BABY BABBLES]
Right.
SPEAKER 2: Don’t just take our word for it. Check out our evidence library on our website to learn about the research that helped us make this episode-- link in description. And there’s plenty of awesome languagey topics and baby cuteness where that came from. Check out our next episode all about multilingualism.
If you want to find out more about the evidence mentioned in the video, the HELLO Lab Presents video series can be found here: HELLO Lab Presents.