We have spoken to you on several occasions about baby-talk or motherese, a children's language to address babies with whom we all transform when talking to the little ones. Everybody? It seems that some more than others, specifically mothers are much more expressive than fathers in this sense.
A study has indicated that mothers raise their tone of voice and give a sweeter touch to the words, the syllables are lengthened and more repetitive sounds are used, they speak with shorter phrases to their babies ... something that they do not do so much. That is to say, we "transform" ourselves more into babies to talk to them like them in that kind of "dialect" and parents use less "baby language" to address their children.
The study, entitled "Fathers' use of fundamental frequency in motherese", focuses on 20 "traditional" families (consisting of mother and father) with children under 30 months. The authors, researchers at Washington State University, have pointed out that it is not "bad results" because the parents contribute to the baby's linguistic development in a different way from the mother. In a way, the fact that they speak to them more "as adults" will be complementary to baby talk.
Nothing happens if the way you talk to the baby is different, but what should be changed is the fact that the parents speak less to the baby than the mothers and you have to try to speak to them a lot, since the more words the babies hear, the sooner they will begin to speak and the wider their vocabulary will be.
Remember that the behavior of baby talk seems to be universal, and has an important role as a facilitator of language learning in children. It is the first time that modulation of language with babies is investigated in terms of differences between mothers and fathers, although the authors point out that it is a small sample and continue to collect data in this regard.
We will be attentive, because later, thanks to thousands of samples that continue to be taken, they will analyze this phenomenon in the long term and it is also intended to observe how the hearing loss affects the baby-talk of the parents and know what happens in single-parent families or formed by people of the same sex.
It seems that parents contribute to the development of language in another way, which is very good, as long as they speak to them and attend to the "answers" of the baby, language acquisition is facilitated. As always, some children will take longer than others, but after all, if there are no problems in development, everyone will end up talking.
What it is about is "to open the way" and it does not matter so much if it is done with one prosody or another, with one intonation or another. The fact that parents talk to them more in a way similar to how they dialogue with other adults is also interesting, since a kind of "bridge" is drawn between children's and adult language. You, dads, do you think you talk to your children differently than moms do?
