Meaning & use
parentese
Last updated
Meaning
noununcountabletechnical
The slow, high-pitched, sing-song way adults speak to babies and young children, with exaggerated vowels and simple words.
Grammar: Uncountable: speak parentese, not a parentese.
Patterns
- speak parentese to someone
- talk in parentese
Researchers found that babies respond more to parentese than to ordinary adult speech.
She slipped into parentese the moment she picked up her newborn.
Parentese helps infants notice the separate sounds of their language.
Common combinations
- speak parentese
- Both parents speak parentese at bath time.
- use parentese
- Teachers of toddlers often use parentese.
- slip into parentese
- He slipped into parentese when the baby smiled.
- exaggerated parentese
- The exaggerated parentese made the baby laugh.
Synonyms and how they differ
- motherese
- Motherese is an older term that wrongly suggests only mothers use this speech style.
- baby talk
- Baby talk often means invented childish words, and can sound mocking, whereas parentese uses real words with a special tone.
- child-directed speech
- Child-directed speech is the formal research term and is less friendly than parentese.
Word family
Commonly confused: parentese or baby talk?
parentese vs baby talk
Baby talk usually means childish made-up words; parentese is real language spoken with a high, slow melody.
Practice
A mother speaks in a slow, high, sing-song voice to her baby. This style is called ____ .
Choose one answer.
Parentese names this special way of talking to infants. Jargon is specialist vocabulary, slang is informal language and a dialect is a regional variety.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “parentese”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.