Nuts and Bolts: baby talk.

I mean, what do generations of parents and grandparents know?

All that silly baby-talk - saying doggy instead of dog, and choo-choo instead of train, and using all those silly high voices. Why on earth have parents all over the world and in every language on earth done that for so many hundreds of years?

Well, obviously, it's because they're uneducated, because otherwise they'd have read the books by the academics and they'd know that such a thing is, not only ridiculous and illogical, but positively harmful.

Except...hang on...

...the academics (or, at least, some of them) have changed their minds. They've found out that using words ending in a ee sound, like tummy or bunny, enable children to learn all sorts of new words faster. Reduplication of sounds, like choo-choo, helps, too (though using words where the sound of the word is connected to its meaning,like crash! or bang! didn't give the same result. The author of the study, though, Dr Mitsuhiko Ota of the University of Edinburgh, wonders if enough data were collected in the study to be sure of this, and also wonders if the study's definition of this sort of word was really properly rigorous in relation to very young children).

The study found that even though special baby-talk vocabulary only makes up about five per cent of speech, it still has a measurable effect on the number of words used by children at nine, fifteen, and twenty one months.

"Even though words such as choo-choo and bunny appear superfluous, they may play an important role in bootstrapping the development of the lexicon as a whole," the study says.

Which leaves me wondering if, instead of using the word bootstrapping, the study had said boot-boot or bootstrappy then somehow I might have understood what it means.

Word To Use Today: bootstrap. I looked this up in a dictionary, and apparently this refers to a way of advancing oneself or accomplishing something, as in, presumably, pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.

Adult vocabulary increases in different ways from those of small children!