Baby Talk

Baby talk, also referred to as caretaker speech, infant-directed speech (IDS) or child-directed speech (CDS) and informally as "motherese", "parentese", "mommy talk", or "daddy talk" is a nonstandard form of speech used by adults in talking to toddlers and infants.

It is usually delivered with a "cooing" pattern of intonation different from that of normal adult speech: high in pitch, with many glissando variations that are more pronounced than those of normal speech. It frequently displays hyperarticulation, a measure of clear speech defined by having large amounts of acoustic space between vowels as measured by formants. Baby talk is also characterized by the shortening and simplifying of words. Baby talk is similar to what is used by people when talking to their pets (pet-directed speech), and between adults as a form of affection, intimacy, bullying or condescension.

Read more about Baby Talk:  Terminology, Universality and Differences By Region, Characteristics, Examples in Literature

Famous quotes containing the words baby and/or talk:

    With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping “homeliness” entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all “sentiment” is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called “the Public,” the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.
    Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)

    It isn’t that I want to hold the children here, it’s just that I worry about what our life will be like. I don’t know what we’ll talk about, just the two of us, after all these years.
    —Anonymous Parents. As quoted in Women of a Certain Age, by Lillian B. Rubin, ch. 2 (1979)