How Does Parentese Improve Children’s Ability to Learn Language?

Parentese also known as ‘Motherese’, ‘Child-directed Speech’ ‘Infant-directed Speech) is the language we use when talking to babies and toddlers. Parentese differs form normal speech as we lengthen parts of words, use higher pitch voices, exaggerate sounds, repetitive language and shorter slower sentences. Studies measuring the amount of parentese used with babies either in a natural environment or intervention in which parents were taught to use more parentese found positive affects on long term word recognition, language growth and child imitations of adult language.