Reification of infant-directed speech? Exploring assumptions shaping infant-directed speech research

The seemingly ubiquitous tendency of caregivers to speak to infants in special ways has captivated the interest of scholars across diverse disciplines for over a century. As a result, this phenomenon has been characterized in quite different ways. Here, we highlight the shift from early definitions of “baby-talk” which implied that the nature of speech directed towards infants would vary in different sociolinguistic contexts, to later terms such as “motherese” or “infant-directed speech” (IDS) which came to refer to a specific set of features, some of which were argued to represent a universal, optimal and culturally invariant form of speech. These divergent conceptualizations of IDS thus reflect broader disciplinary tensions pertaining to the role allotted to cultural processes in psychological research. We hope to contribute to this literature by pointing to the complexity associated with identifying discrete categories of speech (i.e., baby-talk and motherese/IDS) within a complex multi-dimensional sociolinguistic landscape. We also highlight ways in which a lack of attention to the cultural context of infant-caregiver interactions may have led to biased characterizations of IDS. Furthermore, these biases may implicitly penetrate the nature of empirical work on IDS as well. We end with a series of suggestions for future directions.