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PITTSBURGH, Mar 16, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- A psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has discovered babies who are spoken to in infant-directed speech learn to talk sooner.
Erik Thiessen, a psychology professor at the university, said his research shows most adults speak to babies in infant-directed speech: short, simple sentences coupled with higher pitch and exaggerated intonation.
He said such speech patterns assist infants in learning words more quickly than normal adult speech.
Thiessen and his colleagues exposed 8-month-old infants to fluent speech made up of nonsense words. They then assessed whether the infants had been able to learn the words.
They found infants who were exposed to fluent speech with the exaggerated intonation contour characteristic of infant-directed speech learned to identify the words more quickly than infants who heard fluent speech spoken in a more monotone fashion.
"Learning a language is one of the most critical things that an infant has to do, because communication with other people is tremendously important," Thiessen said. "It makes a great deal of sense that the special way we have of talking to babies would help them learn."
Copyright 2005 by United Press International.
