Week 3 Post 1

The discussion topics for this week were very interesting to me. I really enjoyed the video that we had to watch for part 1. The majority of the topics discussed in the video were things that I had never learned before. One of the topics that was new to me was the "motherese" form of speech. Although I have definitely spoken to infants in a different way than I do adults, I never thought in an in-depth way about it. After watching the video, it makes perfect sense as to why most people speak to infants in this way. In addition, I found it interesting that parents speak to infants in a melodic way which can soothe, arouse, warn, etc. which is absent from normal adult conversations. I did not know this before watching the video and I also did not know that babies can understand the parents' intentions from the melodies even though they don't understand the meaning of each word. I was also intrigued by part 2 of this discussion. Watching and analyzing the youtube video helped me to fully understand the concepts in the "Discovering Psychology" video. In the video I watched, the mother did a great job in demonstrating the characteristics of "motherese" by talking to their baby in a higher pitch and using child-directed speech. When I commented on another student's post, I watched the video they posted. It was neat to compare the babies' stages because in my video, the baby was cooing and in her video, the baby was babbling.