WHY BABY TALK?
Language-as-interaction can be divided into five main areas: pedagogy, control, affection, social exchange, and information. Our goal in looking at each of these five areas is to establish that baby talk is a coherent language style used both with children and adults, and that it arises for identifiable, logical reasons. Pedagogy. Many features of baby talk are primarily pedagogical in character. Consider phonology. The common baby talk techniques of speaking slow, overenunciating, and overemphasizing one or two words in a sentence (“That’s a truck, Katie. It’s a truck”) are tailor-made for the 1- or 2-year-old child trying to segment the speech stream into comprehensible units. Many adults attempt (without great success) to simplify the terminology used for labeling the surrounding environment by substituting onomatopoetic variations (e.g., choo-choo for train) or familiar names for more complex realities (e.g., calling a chimpanzee a monkey). Syntactically, the use of nouns instead o
