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September 5, 2024

Encouraging the Use of “Parentese” to Support Infant and Toddler Language Development

Research has increasingly shown us the importance of exposing babies to a large amount of language from birth.

In addition to building language skills, talking with babies supports the development of cognitive and social-emotional skills. From turn-taking to narration of daily routines, there are many strategies that caregivers can use to engage with babies and toddlers through speech. One specific type of child-directed speech used by caregivers is known as parentese, notable for its higher pitch and elongated vowels.

Parentese demonstrates that how we talk to babies is at least as important as what we are saying to them. But does everyone speak to babies and toddlers in the same way? And what is best for early language acquisition?

We spoke with Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez, Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Washington, to find out more.

Could you explain the difference between parentese and what some people might consider baby talk?

Parentese is the acoustically exaggerated speech register that's distinguished from adult-directed speech by a number of segmental and prosodic features, including a higher overall pitch and a wider pitch range.

Parentese also tends to have a slower speech rate and exaggerated intonation. There are usually fewer and simpler lexical items, as well as shorter utterances or longer pauses between words or phrases. What’s important to understand is that when we say parentese, we’re referring to speech that’s completely grammatical. We’re using real words and grammatical sentences, but the sentences and words are adapted or calibrated to meet the child just a little bit above their level at that time.

If a child is just starting to produce their first words, then it makes sense to produce shorter sentences and to repeat some of those words and present them in isolation, in addition to within a sentence. So, for example, you could say “that’s a ball, ball, ball.” For a child just beginning to produce words, that kind of speech is more appropriate than a very long, complex sentence. But importantly, it’s grammatical speech.

Baby talk sometimes has a negative connotation. People tend to think about using irregular grammar or using non-words like, “Ooh, sweetie, you have shoezie woozies on your cutesy feets.” That’s not what we have in mind when we talk about parentese.

When we say parentese, we're talking about grammatical speech, but speech that does have features like those different acoustics. And importantly, it's calibrated or adapted to what the child is producing in that moment.

Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez

Is parentese used in the same way across cultures in the US? I think some people assume that it might be an upper-middle class phenomenon.

In the United States, I have recorded many families: English-speaking families (more upper middle class), but also many Spanish-speaking and bilingual families of varying socioeconomic classes, levels of education, and countries of origin.

Every single parent that I have recorded — mothers and fathers — has produced at least some parentese, although the amount is highly variable and parents do have different levels of awareness around their parentese use. Of course, we continue to record families of varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds, so the jury on that is still out there!

Would you say that mothers and fathers use it equally?

I think one thing that is different and that has been replicated in the United States across different cultures is that, in general, moms tend to produce more parentese compared to dads. Moms also tend to talk more than dads with their babies. And that's not necessarily just because they tend to be around more.

The way we collect data is we have these tiny recorders — a recorder that you fit in a tee-shirt that the baby wears. And it records everything that the child produces and everything that the child hears. We always ask families to use these recorders on days when both parents are home and not working. That’s purposely so that we record both moms and dads. And what we’re seeing is that generally, even when both parents are home, moms tend to talk more with their child, and they also tend to use more parentese compared to dads.

If you control for the amount of speech that moms produce, then the amount of parentese is the same. All dads that I have recorded so far have used parentese. However, their levels of awareness around using parentese are variable, and more so than what we see in mothers. That is, many dads are not aware that they use parentese at all. When I talk to them, they’ll say, “Oh yeah, I don’t talk to my child like that. I talk to my baby like I talk to an adult.” And then I’ll play their recording back and say, “Well, you actually do.” Many dads are surprised about this and excited that what they’re doing with their voice is actually a very positive thing.

What overall would you say is the connection between parental language and children's language acquisition and development?

This is a topic that’s been studied for a long period of time, but over the last few years with the development of new methodologies and new technologies, we’re really seeing a big step forward in this area.

The biggest difference within the last few years has been the use of these day-long recordings which allow us to study how parents interact with children “in the wild,” meaning how children go about their days naturally. Before, we recorded 20 minutes of parents playing on the floor with their children in their homes. And that’s good — that has some advantages. But the truth is that children don’t spend their whole days playing on the floor with their parents. So, the biggest advantage now is that we can really gain insight into how children learn language as they interact naturalistically and as they go about their lives on a day-to-day basis.

What we’ve learned over the last few years is that there is a fairly strong relationship between what caregivers produce and how children learn language. We used to think that it was just the number of words that children hear that’s going to be predictive of their outcomes. It turns out that’s definitely not the case. Of course, it is important to hear words in order to learn words, but we now know that there are specific features of input that can be particularly important for language development. But what these features are, of course, changes over time.

For a child who’s just learning to produce words, the features of parental input that are going to be important are going to be different compared to a child who’s already producing long sentences. It really comes down to parents and caregivers being able to scaffold their child’s language, to realize where the child is linguistically and meet the child where they’re at and just be one level above the child and provide that type of support. Many parents do this unconsciously. It’s really interesting to study that process because what we’re seeing is that parents are actually very, very good at this. And then as the baby responds, we see this feedback loop between the baby and the parent and the back and forth. That then leads to further growth.

It really comes down to parents and caregivers being able to scaffold their child's language, to realize where the child is linguistically and meet the child where they're at and just be one level above the child and provide that type of support.

Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez

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Is parentese part of that scaffolding process? And what is it about parentese that babies are responding to?

Babies prefer parentese to adult-directed speech. We have known that for a long time, and that has been replicated in large-scale studies. It's not just a preference — these specific features of parentese have been linked to specific language learning opportunities.

For example, having longer pauses in between words helps the baby segment the stream of speech. If you imagine yourself going to a foreign country where you don’t know the language and you walk into a bar and you just hear it spoken, it’s very hard to say where one word ends and begins.

Parentese, by inserting pauses in between words and in between sentences, helps with speech segmentation. The other thing it does is exaggerate the differences between different speech sounds. If you look at the specific acoustic features of vowels, when you use parentese you make vowels more different from one another. And that has been shown to help babies learn the categories of speech sounds. It makes it easier for them to determine that this vowel is different from the other one.

Then, of course, there’s repetition. Repeating the same word — presenting the word in isolation — has been shown to be helpful for word learning. These day-long recordings have shown us that when you measure the amount of parentese that a child is exposed to on a day-to-day basis, we do see a very clear link with language outcomes.

How do infants translate sounds to langauge?

What if you’re working with a parent who seems a little resistant to parentese, or says they don’t like using it?

When I talk to parents, I am very aware that people have different preferences, beliefs, and ideas.

This is why when we conduct intervention work with parents, we like to record parents and then play back their own recordings to show them that in fact, they are already doing this, and they’re very good at it. We show them concrete examples of their own speech, and their own parentese, to scaffold their confidence and understanding that what they’re doing is in fact building their child’s brain “Listen to yourself, this is what it sounds like. And this is really helpful for your child’s language development.”

The point is to show them concrete examples of their own behavior, rather than telling them what they’re doing is wrong or what they’re doing is going to be harmful for their baby or anything like that. Take what they’re already doing and explain to them how it is related to their child’s language development. We can say, “Yesterday at the grocery store, you pointed to an apple and you said, ‘look, that’s an apple.’ And your child repeated that word after you. And now, can we take that and maybe do it next time you are putting your child in the car seat? You can use that same type of interaction.” We can adapt our feedback based on their lifestyle, their cultural beliefs, etc.

Parents know that they have to talk to their child for them to learn language. They know that the baby needs to hear words to learn language. What a lot of parents don’t necessarily think about is that how they talk to their baby also matters. There’s this idea that we should talk to children like we talk to an adult — but when we listen to parents, they really don’t talk to their children like they talk to adults, and that’s a good thing! Some people may not realize that we adapt our speech based on our interlocutor [partner]. It’s just that people vary in how much they do it, the level at which they do it, and their awareness of it. What we try to do is explain in very positive terms what these types of speech adaptations do and why they’re helpful. Many parents will say things like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I can see why slowing it down and speaking clearly would be helpful for my child.” Just having that awareness can be helpful.

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