Also, linguistically, why is repeating a word make it associated to baby talk? E.g. “No no”, “bye bye”.
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Disclaimer: just a mom
So I think there’s a few reasons:
1. Babies babble naturally. That babbling is usually a repetition of vowel sounds (from my experience). Once they can pick up a consonant sound (like “d”) I believe it’s much more natural for them to incorporate that into their babbling instead of repeating single sounds. (“Ah ah ah ah” turns into “dah dah dah dah”)
2. Because they babble in strings of sounds, repeating words with more than one syllable probably encourages them to continue babbling after the target words. (Like saying “Dada da dee dee dee buh buh” instead of just “DA!”)
3. I think I read somewhere that it takes the average person 6 repeats to commit something to memory. Even if that’s false, the more you repeat, the easier it is to remember. So “mama” becomes familiar a lot faster than just “ma” would.
4. With talking toddlers, if you ask them to say a new word (like “corn”) but you repeat the first consonant sound (“cuh cuh cuh corn”), they will be much more likely to try to repeat the word than just by hearing it (from my experience). Saying “mama” and “dada” kind of sets up the foundation of that familiarity. Once they’re older, “mama” becomes “muh muh mango”, “mah mah mad”, “muh muh monkey” and so on.
Again this is all just speculation from my limited experience as a mom. Hope it helped or made sense!
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