Baby talk 101: How infant-directed speech helps babies learn language

Whether you think it’s cute, or it makes you squirm, “baby talk” is a compelling, scientific phenomenon. All around the world, people use a special register when they speak to the very young. This “infant-directed speech,” or IDS, is recognizable for its higher pitch, and more melodic, emotionally-charged tone.

These features capture a baby’s attention, and make it easier for him or her to grasp the emotional intentions of speech.

father smiles, face to face communication with young infant

In fact, fascinating experiments show that adults listening to a foreign language were better able to pick up on a speaker’s emotions when he or she used infant-directed speech (Bryant and Barret 2007; Bryant et al 2012). You can read more about it in my article on the attention-getting and emotional functions of baby talk.

But what about language development? Does infant-directed speech help babies learn how to talk?

Infant-directed speech includes many modifications that seem tailor-made for the language learner. It’s slower, more repetitive, and more likely to exaggerate the pronunciation of vowels. In addition, people using IDS are more likely speak in shorter, simpler utterances. Experiments suggest that these modifications help babies develop several key abilities, including

  • the ability to discriminate between different speech sounds
  • the ability to detect the boundaries between words in a stream of speech
  • the ability to recognize distinct clauses in a stream of speech

It’s even possible that individual differences in the way that parents use baby talk could affect how quickly infants learn to speak.

So it seems that we have lots of reasons to forget our inhibitions and let loose with the baby talk. Here is the evidence.


Infant-directed speech may help babies tune into the sounds of their native language

When people use IDS, they may hyper-articulate vowel sounds — pronoucing them in more extreme ways, so that different vowel sounds contrast more strongly with each other (Marklund and Gustavsson 2020). Adults do the same thing when they talk to people with foreign accents (Uther et al 2007).

Does this exaggerated pronunciation make it easier for people to learn about speech sounds? If so, we might predict that the more a mother hyper-articulates, the better her infant should perform on tests of speech perception.

Researchers Huei-Mei Liu and colleagues tested this idea in a study of Mandarin-speaking babies in Taiwan (Lui et al 2003).

The infants (aged 6 to 12 months) were presented with a background sound — a word repeated over and over again on a loudspeaker. Then researchers switched to another word, one that differed by a single consonant (like switching from “jet” to “set”). If babies recognized the switch, they turned their heads toward the loudspeaker.

Using this measure, the researchers assessed each baby’s speech perception skills in a series of 30 trials. They also recorded and analyzed the infant-directed speech patterns of the baby’s mother. The results? There was a correlation between maternal hyperarticulation and baby speech perception skills:

Mothers who tended to hyperarticulate their vowels had babies who performed better on the speech perception test.

mother talking cheerfully, face-to-face, with attentive baby

This link remained significant even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomic variables, like parental education level and occupation. And other research has documented similar developmental patterns. For example, in a study of toddlers learning to speak English, kids tended to grow bigger vocabularies if their mothers pronounced their vowels with greater clarity (Hartman et al 2017).

Granted, this type of correlational research doesn’t prove that infant-directed speech accelerates language learning. It’s possible that some unidentified factor — like an inherited aptitude for both speaking and perceiving speech sounds — explains the link between maternal speech clarity and infant speech perception.

Moreover, hyperarticulation may be a common feature of infant-directed speech, but it isn’t a cultural universal. In a large study testing adults from more than 180 countries worldwide, people in most societies associated infant-directed speech with the tendency to heighten the contrast between vowels (Hilton et al 2022). But there are places where hyper-articulation isn’t the norm.

For example, in recent studies, English-speaking mothers living Canada didn’t hyperarticulate (McClay et al 2022). And in Japan, mothers actually had a slight tendency to enunciate less clearly when speaking to their infants (Martin et al 2016). So it appears that this aspect of infant-directed speech varies from one language to the next.

Nevertheless, when folks do hyperarticulate, it appears to help listeners “tune into” the right speech sounds.

For instance, an experiment using playbacks of computer-synthesized speech found that infants under 4 months of age could detect a change in a syllable of a 3-syllable utterance only when that syllable was spoken in speech that simulated the high pitch, intensity, and stretched-out pronunciation of infant-directed speech (Karzon 1985).

And researchers have used computer models to demonstrate the superiority of IDS for teaching listeners about vowel sounds. Decades ago, Bart deBoer and Patricia Kuhl presented a computer model with samples of adult-directed and infant-directed speech. Then they “asked” the model to identify certain key vowel sounds. When the computer model was exposed only to talk designed for babies, its answers were more accurate (deBoer and Kuhl 2003).


Baby talk also makes it easier to learn about words

When we hyperarticulate, it doesn’t just highlight specific sounds or syllables. It can also help entire words stand out. For example, in an experiment on 19-month-old toddlers, researchers found that these young children could better recognize entire words if an adult spoke the words with exaggerated, hyperarticulated vowels (Song et al 2010). So that’s one way that IDS may support word learning.

But let’s take a step back. Before you can recognize a word, you need to find it in the ongoing stream of speech, and that’s more challenging than you might realize. You’ve already become an expert! Yet consider the difficulties.

When you read text, it’s obvious where the words are. Each word is surrounded by empty space, so it’s easy to tell where one word ends and another begins.

What happens when we listen to everyday speech, though? It’s usually a mess. When fluent adults talk to each other, they unleash a steady stream of sound — a mish-mash of phonetic elements without anything as helpful as “empty space” between words.

For instance, take the phrase “Mama is happy.” When it’s spoken, it sounds like “mamaizhappy” or maybe even “mamazappy.” Where are the boundaries between words? To a person who doesn’t know English, there are many possibilities, like:

“Ma ma izhapp y”

“Mamaiz ha ppy”

“Ma ma izhappy”

So how do listeners find the right word boundaries?

One answer is that we hear lots of utterances, and eventually our brains notice statistical patterns. We notice, for instance, that the sounds “iz happ” get paired up less often that “hap pee.” So we figurs out that “happy” is a word and “izhapp” is not (Saffron et al 1996).

How early in life does this happen? Eight month old babies have done it by listening to many examples of adult-directed speech (Saffron et al 1996). And amazingly, experiments indicate that newborns can do it too (Fló et al 2022; Fló et al 2019).

But we have reason to think that infant-directed speech makes the task easier. In tests, babies (aged 6-7 months) performed better on word segmentation after listening to infant-directed speech (Thiessen et al 2005).

Interestingly, baby talk seems to help adults, too. When English-speaking adults were presented with playbacks of Mandarin Chinese, they were able to pick out and learn new words more easily when the playbacks featured infant-directed speech (Golinkoff and Alioto 1995).

It seems, then, that infant-directed speech has properties that make it easier for listeners to discover the boundaries between words (Kemler-Nelson et al 1989; Thiessen et al 2005). But what are these properties?

To some degree, baby talk helps because it’s an attention-grabber.

Numerous studies demonstrate that babies prefer listening to infant-directed speech. And when babies pay more attention, they may be more likely to notice the statistical patterns in speech. Enhanced attention may also help them remember these patterns better (Thiessen et al 2005).

Consistent with this idea, researchers report that infant-directed speech — accompanied by direct eye contact — has a special effect on the brain. When adults communicated face-to-face using infant-directed speech, babies experience enhanced activity in brain regions associated with processing auditory messages. Similar attempts using everyday, adult speech had no such effect (Lloyd-Fox et al 2015).

But infant-directed speech does more than perk a baby’s interest. People using IDS tend to repeat their words, giving babies extra opportunities to listen and learn.

When researchers tracked the development of 121 infants, they found that a mother’s tendency to use repetitive language at 7 months predicted her child’s vocabulary at 24 months (Newman et al 2015).

In addition, IDS is structured in ways that make it objectively easier to discover new words.

Infant-directed speech is slower and marks the spaces between phrases with longer pauses (Kuhl et al 1997). And speakers sometimes make key words stand out.

For example, in English-speaking countries, adults addressing babies tend to alter their typical sentence structure, re-ordering things so that a new or important word comes at the end of an utterance (Fernald and Mazzie 1991; Aslin et al 1996).

People do the same thing when they are teaching adults new, technical terms (Fernald and Mazzie 1991), and it’s a helpful ploy: In one study, 15-month-old infants were better able to recognize new words when these words appeared in the final position of an utterance (Fernald et al 1998).

So can you give your infant a boost by becoming a better baby-talker?

As noted above, that’s hard to prove on the basis of simple correlations between parents and babies. Parents who are really good at IDS might be good at language in general. We can’t rule out the possibility that genetics plays a role in their children’s development.

Still, we can see that infant-directed speech has just the kinds of features you’d expect from a “tutorial” mode of communication — grabbing attention, and making it easier for listeners to notice key features of speech. And we also have the evidence from a “natural” experiment — a commonplace problem that tends to alter parents’ usage of infant-directed speech in the real world.

Depression inhibits the expression of infant-directed speech…and this can interfere with infant learning

In one experiment on 4-month-old baby, Peter Kaplan and his colleagues found that infants could learn to associate a photograph of an unfamiliar, smiling face with an unfamiliar voice speaking baby talk (Kaplan et al 2002). But there was a catch:

When the speaker was a depressed woman, her infant-directed speech was flatter, more monotonic, and the babies failed to show significant learning in the task.

Moreover, subsequent studies have detected effects on babies whose mothers suffer from postpartum depression. For example, when Kaplan and his colleagues tested babies at multiple time points — once at 4 months, and then again at 12 months or beyond — the researchers found that maternal depression at 4 months postpartum predicted poorer learning performance at a later age (Kaplan et al 2012; Kaplan et al 2015).

This decrement in learning performance can’t be entirely chalked up to the lackluster IDS spoken by mothers who were depressed. Depression affects mothers’ behavior in many ways, any of which could have contributed to learning difficulties. But statistical analysis suggests that IDS impairments played a role (Kaplan et al 2015). And given that numerous studies confirm the link between depression and lower-quality IDS (Scheiber et al 2022; Lam-Cassettari et al 2020), this may be a problem that affects many families.

So it seems that the quality of infant-directed speech can have an impact on the way babies learn, and that early exposure matters. Women suffering from postpartum depression have yet another reason to seek treatment and support.

It’s also possible that the absence of expressive baby talk may contribute to speech delays in some toddlers. Studies suggest that some “late talkers”–defined as toddlers who reach the age of 2 years with fewer than 50 words in their vocabularies–haven’t heard as much expressive infant-directed speech as have normally-developing kids.

In particular, researchers have found that mothers of late talkers speak target words with a lower pitch than do mothers of normally-developing kids (D’Odorico and Jacob 2006; Hampson and Nelson 1993).

Of course, we should be careful interpreting such studies. Just because you have a late talker doesn’t mean you failed to provide your baby with the right kind of baby talk!

But it seems there is ample evidence to show that infant-directed speech is helpful. I think we might consider it an important facet of responsive, sensitive parenting during the first two years of life.

More information

Are you feeling depressed? If so, don’t put off self-care. Talk with your doctor about your symptoms, and get social support. To learn about the signs of postpartum depression, see my article, “Postpartum depression symptoms: When is it more than the baby blues?”

For more information about the ways that young children learn speech, see my article, “How to support language development in babies.” In addition, you may be interested in my articles about the effects of television on children’s language skills and baby sign language.

You can read more about the attention-getting and emotional functions of infant-directed speech here.

And check out your baby’s ability to “mind meld.” Read my article, “Talking to babies: How friendly eye contact can help babies tune in — and tune into our brain activity.”


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Written content last modified 12/2023. Portions of the text derive from earlier versions of this article, written by the same author.

image of man with baby by istock / Sirikornt

image of mother speaking clearly to infant by JBryson / istock