Baby Talk: It Makes Your Baby Smarter!

My husband and I entertain ourselves and our baby by making up goofy songs, faces, and inventing words to entertain her.  When she coos and gurgles in her cute little way, we pretend to know just what she means and carry on a silly high-pitched conversation. She loves it and we love the smiles!

We just do it to make her happy, but according to a recent article from The Atlantic, we might be making her smarter too.  Here's what the experts have to say about baby talk:

New research suggests it’s how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development.

So, how did they figure that out?

Researchers from the University of Iowa and Indiana University observed a small group of mothers and their infants in individual unstructured play sessions over the course of six months, beginning when the children were eight months old, and coded the mothers’ responses to their babies’ babbling into two categories. “Redirective” responses involved turning the babies’ attention elsewhere, like showing them a toy or pointing out something in the room, while “sensitive” responses were ones where the mothers verbally replied to or imitated their sounds—though, as the study notes:

Imitations rarely took the form of imitating the sound that the infant made, but more often involved the mother modeling the word that the sound approximated and expanding on it (e.g., if the infant uttered “da-da-da,” the mother would say “Da-da is working. I am ma-ma”).
A month after their last session, the mothers filled out a survey assessing the progress their children had made towards speech. The infants whose mothers had shown “sensitive” responses, the researchers found, showed increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations—meaning that their babbling more closely resembled something like real syllables, paving the way for real words. The same babies were also more likely to direct their noises at their mothers, indicating that they were “speaking” to them rather than simply babbling for babbling’s sake.

“The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative,” study author Julie Gros-Louis, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. In other words, by acting like they understood what their babies were saying and responding accordingly, the mothers were helping to introduce the concept that voices, more than just instruments for making fun noises, could also be tools for social interaction.

I'm not an expert like Julie Gros-Louis or the researchers at Iowa and Indiana University, but I do know that we practiced the same sort of “baby talk” with my son who is now three and he has amazing language skills! He's far ahead of his peers when it comes to language ability.  I'll be doing the same thing with my daughter, I'll let you know how it turns out.

Want to read more about baby talk and the new research behind it?  Check out the complete article on pretending to understand baby talk from The Atlantic.