Hyper-articulation of child-directed speech

Child-directed speech (CDS) is the speech style used by mothers, fathers, and others to talk to an infant or young child and is known to engage attention, regulate arousal levels, and facilitate language development. Typically, its production involves adopting a strategy of simplifying what is said and exaggerating how it is said, or more specifically, exaggerating its prosodic and phonetic features. Adjustments that make CDS linguistically distinctive from adult-directed speech (ADS) include shorter utterances, more repetition, simplified syntax, and smaller vocabulary. Prosodically, it has exaggerated intonation and positive emotion, and phonetically, it contains hyperarticulation of certain speech sounds.