The Cognitive Poetics of Babytalk and the Poetic Potentials of the Persian Lullabies

In communication with infants, adults usually use a certain kind of language which in vocal stretches, hesitations and repetitions is different from the usual adults' conversational language. This special kind of language is called "Babytalk". The cognitive investigations on Babytalks has shown some specific poetic characteristics which can prove the existence of literal cognition in human infant as soon as the first weeks of life. This article as the first step, argues the theoretical researches which prove the cognitive potentials of poetic understanding in infants, among them David Mail and Ellen Dissanayake's research (2002). In the next step, the potentiality of cognitive poetics of Persian lullabies is argued. In this section we are going to show if the aesthetic criteria of Babytalks exist in lullabies as well; and if the lullabies can serve as the reference of the paradigms of infants' cognitive poetics? The results of our assessment show that Persian lullabies respond positively to the poetic characteristics of Babytalks. Those poetic dynamics which are in common between Babytalks and Persian lullabies including special metric features, simplifying, frequency of frontal phonemes, parallelism and iconicity are surveyed here.