Sunrise Ruby

An IM conversation with a friend this afternoon has me thinking about motherese, the modified form of speech that mothers and other caretakers sometimes use to talk to infants. Some researchers have suggested that motherese aids in children’s cognitive development and helps them acquire language, but motherese isn’t universal–in some Samoan tribes, for example, children aren’t spoken to until they reach a certain age.

Is motherese actually helpful for language acquisition, given that not all mothers do it, but all normally-developing children successfully acquire language anyway? My friend thinks that it likely isn’t, and that instead motherese perpetuates the negative stereotype that women are intellectually inferior to men, and that it reinforces their lower relative social status.

How is my own speech different when I talk to Ben, I wonder? I make an effort to talk to him frequently when he’s awake, and I know I adjust the content of my speech for him; I repeat things a lot when I’m talking to him, and I state obvious things that I wouldn’t otherwise state, like “Time to change your diaper” as I’m changing his diaper. But I don’t have a good sense of whether/how I adjust the form (the phonology and morphology) of my speech when I’m speaking to him. It’d be interesting to record myself and see. (Once a linguistics nerd, always a linguistics nerd.)