...and what about "babytalk!" Here's an excerpt from a Carnegie Mellon University study about the effect of
adults babytalking...
"Most adults speak to infants using so-called infant-directed speech: short, simple sentences coupled with
higher pitch and exaggerated intonation. Researchers have long known that babies prefer to be spoken to in
this manner. But Thiessen's research has revealed that infant-directed speech also helps infants learn words
more quickly than normal adult speech. In a series of experiments, he and his colleagues exposed 8-month-old
infants to fluent speech made up of nonsense words. The researchers assessed whether, after listening to the
fluent speech for less than two minutes, infants had been able to learn the words. The infants who were exposed
to fluent speech with the exaggerated intonation contour characteristic of infant-directed speech learned to
identify the words more quickly than infants who heard fluent speech spoken in a more monotone fashion.
How about how they listen? Apparently babies don't hear the same things we hear."
"The world apparently sounds very different to infants than it does to adults. Sometimes it's filled with a
cacophony of sounds that makes it difficult for babies to distinguish a single sound from all the surrounding
noise", says a University of Washington scientist. That's because babies are generalists and hear all frequencies
simultaneously so they can respond to unexpected sounds, reports Lynne Werner, a UW professor of speech and
hearing science, in the May edition of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America."
"Babies have a different way of listening to the world," contends Werner. "In real life we are confronted with
a variety of sounds. Somehow the adult brain takes all sounds we hear and separates them into where they are
coming from and then focuses on the one we want to hear. Adults usually hear in a narrow band of sound, while
babies seem to use a different approach. They don't have the selective attention of adults and they don't pay
attention all of the time. Instead they always seem to be listening broadband or to all frequencies
simultaneously."
- Lynne Werner, University of Washington, Professor of Speech and Hearing Science, in the May edition of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
