Baby talk used by adults and why we speak in baby talk with kids

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Picture the scene: you’re tired, you’re hungry, you order a morning coffee ‘and a nana please’. Oops!

You might feel embarrassed when baby talk creeps into regular adult conversation, but it can happen, especially if you spend a lot of time talking to children. And did you know some features of baby talk make up a lot of our everyday speech?

Child or Infant-Directed Speech, known more commonly as ‘baby talk’, has been proven to improve language-learning in little ones by helping them tune into adults' speech. But even childfree grown-ups are using it all the time without thinking too much about it.

Here’s three common characteristics of speech that we borrow from baby talk and how they benefit little ones’ language development.

Diminutives

A diminutive is a word which is changed to convey ‘smallness’ or endearment. An example of this would be adding a ‘y’ sound to the end of words like ‘dog’ to make ‘doggy’.

A cartoon of a cat, dog and bird labelled 'kitty', 'doggy' and 'birdy'. — Image caption,
We often use diminutives without thinking when we speak to children, but did you know they help with their learning?

This feature occurs in many languages: for example, in Spanish, changing the end to ‘-ito/-ita’ changes words to a diminutive version, and it's often used for affectionate terms - so your 'abuela' (grandmother) might also be your 'abuelita'. Similarly, in German you can add the ending '-chen' to make something small, e.g. 'liebchen' (little love) is a common term of endearment.

We often use diminutives without thinking when we speak to children, referring to a ‘birdy’ instead of a ‘bird’ or a ‘’kitty’ instead of a ‘cat’. You might worry that using these instead of the proper words will hinder learning. However, research shows that the opposite is true: sounds added to a root word actually help babies to pick these out as individual words within sentences. found that children between 4 and 21 months who heard more diminutives from their caregivers were quicker to build vocabulary than those who heard fewer.

In English, it’s common to add a ‘-y’ sound to words (kitty, birdy, etc.), but there are words we use in common speech where even the root has come from baby talk. For example ‘tummy’ uses a similar sound to ‘stomach’ which is easier for little mouths to say (‘tomach → ‘tum’ or ‘tum-tum’). The word ‘tummy’ has been in use since the mid-19th Century, with a written record of a ‘tummy-ache’ in 1874, and eventually us adults came to adopt it when talking to each other as an informal way of talking about our stomachs.

Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeias are words which sound like the thing they’re referring to. We’re taught these when we’re young and never stop using them. Think about it, you’re likely to have been taught at a very young age that cow goes 'moo', dog says 'woof', etc.

Onomatopoeias are thought to be helpful for language learning as it’s easier to understand and remember a word that ‘matches’ what it describes in its sound. It’s also thought that because adults will change their tone of voice and pitch when using them, it makes them more engaging for little ones. So, onomatopoeic words support speech development as they involve sensory learning.

You probably use onomatopoeias without even noticing, for example you might not add your onions to the pan until it sizzles or politely remind someone that time is ticking.

A cartoon of the words bang, crash and sizzle — Image caption,
Onomatopoeic words are easier to remember because they sound like the sounds they describe.

Reduplication

Reduplication is the repetition of whole words, partial sounds or similar sounds to form a new word, and is frequently found in baby talk. You can even hear it in baby babble around the six-month mark, with repeated sounds like 'bababa', 'gagaga' etc.

Using the earlier example of ‘stomach’, ‘tum-tum’ takes a more digestible partial sound and repeats it. Repetition is good for children’s learning in lots of ways. Researchers in the Edinburgh study found that babies are more likely to come to understand words with repeated sounds as they stand out when spoken by adults around them. They are also more likely to be memorable than their more ‘adult’ forms. So babies are more likely to remember the sound of ‘night-night’ than ‘goodnight’ for example, making it easier for them to pick up on its meaning.

A cartoon of a mum and toddler waving to another mum and toddler - one mum is saying 'bye bye' while the other says 'night night' — Image caption,
Repeated word sounds stand out more than others and are more memorable for little ones.

Do we grow out of using baby talk? Not quite. Baby talk characteristics do tend to decrease in little ones as their vocabularies expand, but some still remain. The next time you wish someone 'night-night' or find something 'easy-peasy' as an adult, think about how you're throwing way back to your childhood!