One-on-one 'baby talk' improves tots' vocabulary

Attention parents! One-on-one baby talk with your toddler may lead to better language development in them, a new study has found.
Researchers at the University of Washington and University of Connecticut examined thousands of 30-second snippets of verbal exchanges between parents and babies.
They measured parents' use of a regular speaking voice versus an exaggerated, animated baby talk style, and whether speech occurred one-on-one between parent and child or in group settings.
"What our analysis shows is that the prevalence of baby talk in one-on-one conversations with children is linked to better language development, both concurrent and future," said Patricia Kuhl.

The more parents exaggerated vowels - for example "How are youuuuu?" - and raised the pitch of their voices, the more the one-year olds babbled, which is a forerunner of word production.
Baby talk was most effective when a parent spoke with a child individually, without other adults or children around.

"The fact that the infant's babbling itself plays a role in future language development shows how important the interchange between parent and child is," Kuhl said.
Twenty-six babies about one year of age wore vests containing audio recorders that collected sounds from the children's auditory environment for eight hours a day for four days.

The researchers used LENA ("language environment analysis") software to examine 4,075 30-second intervals of recorded speech.
Within those segments, the researchers identified who was talking in each segment, how many people were there, whether baby talk - also known as "parentese" - or regular voice was used, and other variables.
When the babies were 2 years old, parents filled out a questionnaire measuring how many words their children knew. Infants who had heard more baby talk knew more words.
In the study, 2-year olds in families who spoke the most baby talk in a one-on-one social context knew 433 words, on average, compared with the 169 words recognised by 2-year olds in families who used the least babytalk in one-on-one situations.

The relationship between baby talk and language development persisted across socioeconomic status and despite there only being 26 families in the study.
The study was published in the journal Developmental Science.