Crib talk

Crib talk or crib speech is pre-sleep monologue made by young children while in bed. This starts somewhere around one-and-a-half years and usually ends by about two-and-a-half years of age, though children can continue longer. It consists of conversational discourse with turn-taking often containing semantically and syntactically coherent question-answer sequences. It may contain word play and bits of song and nursery rhyme.

Crib talk has been found in deaf children in their early sign language. It also occurs in autistic children.

Crib talk has been divided into three somewhat overlapping varieties.

This occurs most commonly in early monologues and is done in a low tone. It concerns using language to bring about action and occurs when playing with toys and dolls as “friends” with language embedded in ongoing play. Whilst like conversational speech, it can occur in long uninterrupted sequences in which the child describes what they are doing.

In this a child creates a story about events that have happened or imaginary events in temporal-causal sequences that can be as short as five words or as long as 150. They may include the reciting of stories that have been read to them. They occur throughout the period in which a child engages in crib talk.

These concern what happened in the past, what will happen in the future and how events are organized. They incorporate descriptions used by others to enable prediction.

Such monologues have been argued to play a key role in providing a practice space for developing complex connected discourse, aiding a child to use language as a tool to categorize, explain and know the world, and to “clarify what may originally have been problematic or troublesome”.

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Wikipedia