If you want your infant to be a genius baby who starts to speak your language super early in his or her life, do not baby-talk to him or her. All of that “goo-goo-gah-gah”ing to your baby is not going to help. In fact, it might even confuse the kid!
You see, all humans are programmed to learn phonemes. Every baby has the capability to know every phoneme in the whole entire world. For those of you who do not know, phonemes are the basic “units” of speech. They are the most basic speech sounds such as “a” or “i.” To go even further, morphemes are groups of phonemes. Morphemes are smallest units of speech that actually convey meaning such as “ed” or “er”. Different countries and different languages all have different phonemes and morphemes. But, believe it or not, every baby in this world is born being able to pronounce and “understand” every phoneme. Yes, your baby can speak Japanese.
But seriously now, by baby-talking to your child, you are not teaching him the right phonemes of the, for example, English language. You are probably harming your child because she will try to learn how to pronounce those phonemes rather than true ones.
You know how some people can roll their Rs or how the Dutch and the Germans have that raspy “ghh” zest to their language? Babies in those countries are not taught how to do that, they learn from the people around them. Speaking of other languages, it has been suggested that parents of newborns play foreign music when their child is around so that the child can hear the other phonemes. This may make learning a new language easier for the child later on, because they already have been introduced to the language. S
Babies are extremely intelligent, they just can’t verbalize it.