X-Nico

unusual facts about baby talk


Baby talk

In her New Yorker review of A.A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner (1928), Dorothy Parker, writing under the book reviewer pen name Constant Reader, purposefully mimics baby talk when dismissing the book's syrupy prose style: "It is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."


Christopher and Kevin Graves

During the next 5 years, they had recurring roles on Baby Talk (as "Baby Max", Feb. 1991 - May 1992), Cheers (as "Frederick Crane", April 1991 - January 1993), Dangerous Women (as "Robbie Walker", 1991), Life Goes On (as "Baby Nick", Sept. 1992 - Feb. 1993), and The Bold and the Beautiful (as "C.J. Garrison", 1994–1995).

Look Who's Talking

The success of the first two films also inspired an ABC sitcom called Baby Talk, which aired from 1991–92 and featured Tony Danza as the voice of "Baby Mickey." John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and Olympia Dukakis are the only actors to appear in all three films in the series.

Statistical language acquisition

One of the most used experimental paradigms in investigations of infants’ capacities for statistical language acquisition is the Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP), developed by Stanford psychologist Anne Fernald in 1985 to study infants’ preferences for prototypical child-directed speech over normal adult speech.


see also

Arthur Q. Bryan

One especially memorable appearance was in the Charley Chase short "South of the Boudoir" (1940); as Charley's boss, he spoke in his normal voice, but when surreptitiously coming onto to wife Ann Doran, he switches to baby talk in the Fudd voice.