Producing Child-Directed Speech
Locate a doll that resembles an infant as closely as possible in features and size. Select a friend who has had experience with infants, and ask him or her to imagine that the doll is a niece or nephew who just arrived with parents for a first visit. Encourage your friend to interact with the ‘‘baby’’ in a normal fashion. Observe your friend’s language for qualities such as pitch, variation in pitch, vocabulary, sentence length, repetition, and intonation. Also observe any nonverbal communication. What qualities are different from the language used with adults?
