Does the way parents talk to young children/babies differ from the way that grandparents speak to young children/babies?

By Nicola Mitchell

As an ambitious primary school teacher, I have always been interested in the way that speech towards young children differs between generations in families. All adults usually speak in the same way to children, in a high pitched voice with exaggeration and usually in a singing rhythm. If you were to use a low monotone voice, it would more than likely scare the child or be unsettling. This helps to keep the child's attention and with the use of slower speech, the child is able to grasp a more varied vocabulary.

Many people believe that baby talk can damage the way that children learn language. A study has shown that baby talk is an important tool for learning (1). According to Language Acquisition (2), 'Baby talk' has become recognised as a register of English. 

So does the way parents speak to children differ from the way grandparents do?

Grandparents use more questions when talking to children to understand what they want. For example, "How are you?", "Where are your shoes?" and "Is this your nose?". This shows that grandparents usually use phatic talk and rhetorical questions towards the children. Where as parents (usually the parent who is most around) are more likely to say, "So you're hungry, are you?" and "We'll have to give you some milk then, won't we?". From this we see that parents are more likely to understand the way their children react to what is being said to them. Parents usually use tag questions after each sentence. This is because they are used after a statement to get a reaction from the child or baby (either a physical or verbal response). 

Child-directed speech (Fernald & Morikawa in 1993 (3)), shows how parents use a higher consistency of object labeling and the lexical choices chosen whilst helping their children to develop language. More noun labels are voiced when naming things like toys. However, grandparents are more likely to elongate words, and pronunciation, to help young children understand. For example, "Is this your noooooose?".

However a common trait of both parents and grandparents when speaking to children is the amount of adjectives used in sentences. These are less likely to be present if the person was talking to another adult. For example, "blue", "shiny" and "bouncy" when describing a toy ball.

(1) - August 1st 1997 By Lauran Neergaard in the book Language Acquisition by Frank Myszor and edited by George Keith and John Shuttleworth (1999).

(2)- Language Acquisition by Frank Myszor and edited by George Keith and John Shuttleworth (1999).

(3)- http://psych.stanford.edu/~babylab/pdfs/Fernald&Morikawa%201993.pdf (Accessed in June 2014) by Anne Fernald and Hiromi Morikawa - 1993