Infant-Directed Speech

Infant-directed speech is a style of speech directed toward infants. This type of speech pattern was previously called motherese, because it was assumed that it applied only to mothers. However, that assumption was wrong, and the gender-neutral term infant- directed speech is now used more frequently.

Infant-directed speech is characterized by short, simple sentences. Pitch (the highness or lowness of a sound) becomes generally higher, the range of frequencies (essentially, the difference between the highest and the lowest pitch used) increases, and intonation (the rise and fall in pitch) is more varied. There is also repetition of words, and topics are restricted to items that are assumed to be comprehensible to infants, such as concrete objects in the baby’s environment. Sometimes infant-directed speech includes amusing sounds that are not even words, imitating the prelinguistic speech of infants. In other cases, it has little formal structure but is similar to the kind of telegraphic speech that infants use as they develop their own language skills.

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