Your baby knows exactly what your baby’s words mean

SSome people refuse to use baby talk with children. Repeating meaningless, sweet words that adults usually speak to infants — and pets — can have an annoying quality that makes some people cringe, like nails on a chalkboard. It may seem as if adults are regressing into a more primitive and childish version of themselves.

But talking to children may actually help children learn to speak.

These are the results reached by A He studies Recently published in the magazine Developmental sciences. Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, wanted to know if exaggerated pitches and other sounds typical of what is technically called “infant-directed speech,” or IDS, could help babies learn the difference between one vowel sound and another. Vowel sounds are the sounds that adults usually exaggerate in children’s speech. research This practice has been shown, but this practice is not unique to infant-directed speech. Humans also tend to extract vowel sounds when pronouncing in noisy environments and speaking with non-native speakers.

Whether baby talk helps children learn language has been a somewhat controversial topic. “Previous research has consistently shown that infants prefer to listen to IDS,” researcher Varghese Peter said in an article. statement. “But whether it has any significance beyond that is up for debate.”

Read more: “When children talk to machines“

Some studies have actually shown a link: children whose parents use exaggerated vowel sounds seem to have better language perception abilities and a larger vocabulary later on. But not all children’s speech is characterized by long, lyrical vowels. For example, parents who speak Dutch, Norwegian, and Danish are less likely to use it when speaking with infants. Exaggerated vowels can also blur the differences between one vowel and another, which can, in theory, make it difficult for children to learn how to understand and use them.

To investigate, Peter and his colleagues recruited 22 Australian adults, 24 4-month-old infants and 21 9-month-old infants and brought them to the laboratory. They then played recordings of a single Australian-English mother speaking in babyspeak with her 9-month-old infant and in regular adult speech with another person, and recorded what was happening in the study participants’ brains using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings when they listened to specific vowel sounds spoken in babyspeak. They chose these specific ages because the first year of life is crucial for language development – ​​a time when children become more attuned to the sounds of the native language and less sensitive to non-native sounds. In the first four months, babies mostly learn to match sound patterns, while perception of different vowel classes is thought to develop significantly between six and nine months of age.

What the team found was that 4-month-olds had stronger, more “mature” responses to spoken vowels in baby speech — what they called a “mature” response — while the brains of adults and 9-month-olds responded similarly to both baby speech and regular speech. “When they heard vowels spoken in adult speech, their brains showed a less advanced response. However, when they heard the same vowels spoken in infant-directed speech, their brains produced a more advanced response, similar to that seen in older infants and adults,” Peter explained, referring to 4-month-olds.

He continued: “In other words, baby talk is not silly at all, and may even support early language learning from the age of four months.” Scientists note that it is likely that vowel exaggeration is not the only part of baby speech that could be responsible for the ways in which young children respond to baby speech. Typically, exaggerated vowels coincide with higher pitches and larger pitch ranges, which may also have contributed. Another caveat: the authors focused on a specific contrast between “a” sounds and “i” sounds. The researchers point out that for more difficult vowel contrasts, the benefits of using baby talk could extend beyond nine months.

What they found may not prove that every goo goo gaga creates genius, but it does suggest that this linguistic nonsense has real meaning to those who actually need to hear it.

Main art: Design_Stock7/Shutterstock

• Christine French

  Posted on January 17, 2026

  Christine French is associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news stories for publications such as wired, back channel, edge, and New York Magazine. She earned a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.