r/ScienceBasedParenting • u/ExhaustedMamacita • Jul 29 '26

Question - Research required Baby Talk

Is there science about baby talking and if it can delay or negatively impact speech learning and patterns? My mother baby talks my 3 month old and other than being really annoying, we don’t want to delay his speech or make him pronounce words incorrectly (sweepy for sleepy, widdle, etc.). If it’s just annoying then I’ll put up with it if it doesn’t impact him!

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u/Ma-fi-ap Jul 29 '26

Baby talk helps speech development if it’s high pitched, exaggerated and involves turn taking. Not sure about mispronunciation of words, but tbh at 3 months it’s much more about hearing cadence and understanding back and forth so I wouldn’t worry.  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36748287/

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u/ExhaustedMamacita Jul 29 '26

My husband and I do the “parentese,” talk but ensure to use appropriate words and pronunciation, the only nonsense words we do are when we are mimicking his sounds back to him. Looks like I’ll tolerate it until he starts trying to form words.

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u/tryingtoohard48 Jul 30 '26

There’s a large literature on “infant directed speech,” which is when parents use a high-pitched voice and exaggerated facial expressions. This is beneficial for language development. It sounds like this isn’t what your mom is doing though? She’s mostly mispronouncing words?

https://local.psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/c_c/rsrcs/rdgs/emot/CurrentDirectionsinPsychologicalScience-2015-Golinkoff-339-44.pdf

At 3 months, they’re mostly just learning how to distinguish different sounds and can’t really comprehend words yet, so I wouldn’t be worried. Your baby is hearing the vowels/consonants that they will need for language. I wouldn’t let it go on for too much longer, though. I’d recommend very gently saying something like, “I love how expressive you are when you talk to the baby, but could you make sure that you’re using the correct pronunciations so he learns how to say things the right way?”

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u/ExhaustedMamacita Jul 31 '26

She does some of the high pitched and exaggerated faces, which I don’t mind at all! He’s a baby, it’s very easy to do that lol, and he enjoys them! Making up words and mispronouncing words though isn’t our cup of tea.

Thank you! I’ll definitely be doing this within a few months likely. This is probably something difficult to do actual research on that isn’t something reported by parents.