Is child directed speech (CDS) a good or bad thing?

Laura Boyce

Have you ever noticed how you speak to children? I'm sure I can't be the only one who thinks baby talk is strange yet quite amusing. Come on, if you heard someone speak to an adult the same way they speak to a child you would think they were mad. But when you use repetitive, slow, clear and simple language with children it is completely acceptable and no one would think you are weird. This got me thinking about the effect that CDS has on children and whether hearing this "baby talk" all the time is a bad thing or not.

CDS is not essential for language development as in some cultures there is no such thing, but it has actually been proven that children prefer to listen to CDS than normal everyday adult speech. The use of high pitch, long pauses and exaggerated intonation seem to attract and hold the child's attention. The pauses also allow them more time to process the information they are hearing, which could aid language development as they grow, as it is thought that children learn correct grammar skills from hearing examples in adult speech. Also pausing after a question is asked, helps to introduce children to the rules of conversation. Children become used to the idea of turn taking which again aids their language development.

Other characteristics of CDS include repetition, frequent question asking and use of diminutive forms, for example, 'moo-moo' instead of cow and 'din-dins' instead dinner. This use of doubling a single syllable makes it simple for the child to understand and also easy to pronounce. A linguist called Noam Chomsky stated that children are born with an innate knowledge of language and learning of their native language is at high speed when hearing it from others. So by having this natural understanding already, some would argue that CDS actually interferes with language development because it provides children with an inaccurate and distorted version of normal speech.

Research by Clarke-Stewart in 1973 found that children whose mothers talk more have a larger vocabulary. However research in the same year by Katherine Nelson found that children whose mothers corrected them on word choice and pronunciation actually advanced more slowly than those with mothers who were generally accepting. Both pieces of research argue that CDS does help children learn language but it appears more to help parents communicate with children and that its purpose is social rather than educational, but does that make it a bad thing?

So whether baby talk makes language more accessible for children or if it interferes with their language development by teaching them babyish words, that's up to you to decide. But even if it is a bad thing, I still find it amusing when I hear an adult using baby talk!