Delayed speech? Why 'Baby Talk' is vital to your infant

Babies often imitate facial expressions, sounds, and intonations between the age of one and three months.

They also smile at the sounds of your voice and turn their head toward the direction of the sound, something which experts believe later leads to speech development.

Speech is considered an essential prerequisite for the successful language development of little ones, and if a child does not react to anything or anyone, caregivers begin to worry.

What to do

Well, you can first begin by changing your mood.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have now investigated how the mood of mothers during the postpartum period affects their child's development.

They found that even children whose mothers suffer from mild depressive moods show early signs of delayed language development.

The reason for this could be the way the women talk to the newborns.

They believe their findings could help prevent poor speech development during the early stages.

How a mother’s depressive episodes affect the baby

Up to 70 per cent of mothers develop postnatal depressive mood, also known as baby blues, after their baby is born.

However, it remains unclear, and there is no direct link between depressive mood and poor language development.

The researcher believes that if sounds can be distinguished from one another, individual words can also be distinguished.

“It became clear that if mothers indicate a more negative mood two months after birth, their children show on average a less mature processing of speech sounds at the age of six months,” the authors said.

“The infants found it particularly difficult to distinguish between syllable pitches.”

They found that speech was delayed for mothers with a negative mood more than those in a positive mood.

"We suspect that the affected mothers use less pitch variation when directing speech to their infants. This also leads to a more limited perception of different pitches in the children,” Gesa Schaadt said.

Infant-directed speech, baby talk,  varies greatly in pitch, emphasizes certain parts of words more clearly, and thus focuses the little ones' attention on what is being said, is considered appropriate for children.

Mothers, in turn, who suffer from depressive moods, often use more monotonous, less infant-directed speech.

 "To ensure the proper development of young children, appropriate support is also needed for mothers who suffer from mild upsets that often do not yet require treatment," Schaadt says.

The results show how important it is that parents use infant-directed speech for the further language development of their children.

That doesn't necessarily have to be organized intervention measures.

"Sometimes it just takes the fathers to be more involved."

The study was published in the journal JAMA Network.