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"Six months is the youngest age anyone has been able to show that children seem to pair sounds with a specific meaning" - Peter Jusczyk, psychologist RELATED VIDEO CNN's Ann Kellan reports on the way babies learn to identify sounds and language Windows Media 28K 80K How babies develop language skills Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K

March 18, 1999
Web posted at: 11:55 a.m. EST (1655 GMT)

(CNN) -- Research shows the exaggerated speech pattern known as "baby talk" helps children learn language.

The high-pitched, singsong voice adults often use teaches babies words, sentences and the rhythm of a language.

"It emphasizes certain aspects of the structure of language that a baby should pay attention to," said Peter Jusczyk, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. "We know that these early years are very critical for learning a language ... there are a lot of changes that take place between 6 to 12 months of age." ( 59 K/05 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

Six months is the youngest anyone has been able to show that children pair sounds with a specific meaning, Jusczyk said.

"The difference here is that the words name important social figures," he said. "This suggests that infants begin forming a lexicon with sound patterns linked directly to socially significant people, such as their parents."

In an earlier study, Jusczyk had concluded that at 4 months, babies respond to their own names. But he has since realized this response is largely undifferentiated from other kinds of speech, "just like a child might respond to 'Hi!' without knowing what it means," Jusczyk said. "You can offer certain nonsense words or sounds with an infant, and they'll get excited because it's part of a routine. Maybe the child has the wrong hypothesis about what's going on."

Jusczyk had thought the same might be true for the words "mommy" and "daddy." An experiment with 24 6-month-old babies proved otherwise.

Researchers played recordings of the words "mommy" and "daddy." The babies watched videos of the parents, with the mother in one window and the father in the other.

The babies looked more at their mother's window when they heard the word "mommy," and more at the windows with their fathers when they heard "daddy." The infants did not respond when they watched videos of other adults.

The research also noted that Americans, for some reason, use more exaggerated speech than either Asians or Europeans.

Jusczyk and his colleagues around the world have been discovering that early speech recognition is the culmination of furious intellectual efforts that begin in the womb, where the rhythms of the mother's voice and native language are communicated to the child through the reverberations of her bones.

It is now believed that the ability to decipher language comes to children as a kind of natural endowment, which rapidly turns more sophisticated between the ages of 6 weeks and 2 years.

Correspondent Ann Kellan contributed to this report.

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