The Strange Physics of How Babies Talk - Facts So Romantic

Like all new parents, I must sound like a kook when I babble along with my 9-month-old daughter. That's okay: It delights her. I sometimes ask her what she might mean as she offers some apparently affirming utterance and looks at me with her big blue eyes: Oh, you like it when daddy lifts you? Her vocalizations--the squeals and whoas and yah-wahs--can have surprising verve and a kind of ecological significance. My daughter's noises, scientists say, "catalyze" me to produce "simplified, more easily learnable language."