The universality of baby talk has been a favourite topic of mine for decades, and now a study by the University of York and Denmark’s Aarhus University has revealed that baby talk is the same across 36 languages.
‘Baby talk’, that sing-songy high pitched patter that mums use to speak to their tots (infant directed speech or IDS) is a spontaneous, automatic and intuitive way of speaking to infants – but we don’t understand why we choose to communicate in this way with babies. Could it be essential to child development?
The researchers addressed the question of whether IDS has a universal quality – does it, for example, have the same cadences in English as it does in other languages?
