Do you speak “parentese” with your baby? If not, you might want to start. A new study has found that infants and young toddlers exposed to more “parentese” through one-on-one interactions with their caregivers had much larger vocabularies by age 2 than their peers.
The findings “are consistent with the idea that infants’ early speech and later word production may be related to the social context and the style of speech directed toward the child,” researchers from the University of Connecticut and the University of Washington wrote in an article to be published in the journal Developmental Science.
So what exactly is “parentese”? Think baby talk, but less “googoo, gaga” and more “shooooes” and “diiiaper.”
Alice Gomstyn 