I love the idea that motherese is somehow a biological imperative. It makes a lot of sense, on an intuitive level.

As to the overall idea of intelligence (forgive the somewhat dribbling ramble: I’m almost asleep!):

As a budding counsellor, I value the different ways that intelligence can express itself. For me, emotional agility and resilience are far more valuable traits than vocabulary or mathematics, for example. I tend to worry that our education system is based too firmly in ideas about spelling and reading, and not about communicating clearly, active listening, effective conflict resolution, collaboration and personal improvement. I vigorously reject the idea that these sorts of skills are values based, and to be exclusively the domain of parents and the church etc.

That said, I was an immensely scholastically successful child. I read well, excelled at mathematics and spelling, and understood advanced conceptual mechanisms. I think that it was this sort of mental exercise that helped me become the quick witted, sharp-tack that I am today, and I regret not a single moment of my academically precocious childhood.

You see, I also worry about the idea of “emotional intelligence”, believing as I do that different forms of cognitive agility have more crossover than some might have you believe. I think that being brainy can also help one understand and empathise with ones peers, provided that mental exercises of maths and puzzles are also combined with tasks that encourage you to empathise and master healthy emotional containment.

It’s all about the ways you are encouraged to use your brain. So as long as being academically successful and professionally dynamic is coupled with being an all round quality human, I’m as pleased as punch

/end rant.

There is research in cognitive science on the value of motherese. It might be that motherese in conjunction with a high vocabulary is the ideal way of bringing up babies. Here’s an abstract from a special edition of the journal ‘Brain & Behavioral Science’ dedicated to the positive motherese hypothesis:

“Motherese is a form of affective prosody injected automatically into speech during caregiving solicitude. Affective prosody is the aspect of language that conveys emotion by changes in tone, rhythm, and emphasis during speech. It is a neocortical function that allows graded, highly varied vocal emotional expression. Other mammals have only rigid, species-specific, limbic vocalizations. Thus, encephalization with corticalization is necessary for the evolution of progressively complex vocal emotional displays.”

[Brain & Behaviorial Science, 08/01/2004. Vol.27,Iss.4;p.518-519]