Baby Talk

Under Baby Talk or motherese (debate. [ Mʌðəɹi ː s]; eng ), called also inaccurate Ammensprache, child or baby talk or colloquially " Mutterisch " or " Elterisch " refers to a variety of a language that is preferred over infants and young children used. Baby Talk is considered as an established concept of child language research for a cross-cultural phenomenon as a form of universal voice acting. Was derived from the term secondary baby talk for the use of language that is especially used by caregivers to older and dependent people.

Properties

After Barbara Zollinger Baby Talk or motherese has a communicative and language learning function that supports language acquisition. It is characterized by imitation and expansion, interaction- promoting questions, here - and-now - calls, syntactic simplicity, an attention -generating prosody and intonation, and a decreased rate of speech.

According to Jürgen Dittmann is Ammensprache is characterized by a " high pitch, clear speech, exaggerated intonation, pauses between phrases, emphasizing particularly important words, repetitions, and avoid complex sentences " ( Dittmann 2002) and - possibly with missing modifications such as a high-pitched voice - even against foreigners, the mentally handicapped, the elderly and (smaller) domestic animals applied.

It is mainly characterized by an exaggerated compared to the standard language articulation that can make the segmentation of the speech stream into distinctive units for the child more transparent by the pitch is raised about the deflections and the pitch are coated in pitch course. Complex syntactic structures are avoided and the vocabulary is reduced. It is also possible that adjust the speaker in various aspects of linguistic performance of the child, for example, take up the Silbenreduplikation.

On the other side is also represented in part [ by whom? ], That pronounced motherese inhibits children in their natural urge to explore the world of adults, including their language. The use of " baby talk " of adults is therefore not absolute universals.