Baby Talk Influences Language Acquisition

A new study carried out by researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute shows that the way parents speak to their babies can influence the language acquisition in infants. Scientists have demonstrated that gender, experience and personality influence the way parents process the way they speak with their babies.

Even if “baby talk”, more scientifically known as Infant-directed speech or IDS is something every parent around the globe does, the neural mechanisms of this process were a mystery to scientists. For understanding its functioning, researchers used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to the brains of 35 first-time parents with preverbal babies and 30 men and women without any parenting experience. At the test also took part 16 mothers with infants who spoke two-word utterances and 18 mothers whom children were in elementary school.

Scientists started by measuring the brain activity during active speech but that proved to be very difficult because of the head movements. So, they focused on listening instead, as it has similar activation with no motion necessary. After the subjects had listen to IDS, brain scans revealed that there was an increase brain activity in the areas dedicated to language, in mothers with preverbal children. This was the only group that had increased brain activation, and researchers realized that once the children had passed this preverbal stage, this type of cortical activity in mothers disappeared.

Another observation was that mothers who had scored high on a personality extroversion test, had also an increased brain activation in speech-related motor areas. These two IDS connections are the first evidence at a neural level that clearly show how people process and use “baby talk”. This is like a language bridge between mother and child and it plays an important role in the early stages of language acquisition.

Infant-directed speech is the way adults address infants. It is usually a high-pitched articulated intonation of simple words.