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‘Kitchie-koo’ in modern Hebrew: the sociology of Hebrew baby talk

One day I caught myself quite by surprise speaking 'baby talk' (herafter BT) in Hebrew to my own newly born child. Since I am a native English speaker and never had a chance to learn Hebrew BT (hereafter HBT) as a child, I began musing over the nature of the BT I was using. At first I thought I was perhaps applying English BT features to Hebrew, but since I observed my family and Israeli friends addressing my baby in a similar manner, it seemed that I was actually using HBT. If so, how was this possible? As far as I can recall, I was never addressed by my parents in HBT nor did I ever study it formally. If both native and normative speakers of Hebrew use it, how is it acquired? Moreover, if the features of HBT for natives as well as normative speakers are the same, does this indicate some universal principle at work? With curiosity arising from my own personal experience with the phenomenon as sufficient motivational stimulus, the actual course of my inquiry was guided by the following problems: 1. First and foremost, does HBT actually exist? HBT will be defined as any special form or style of the Hebrew language which is regarded as primarily appropriate for addressing infants and small children not yet fully enculturated into the Hebrew speech community (cf. Ferguson 197la, 1977). BTis to be distinguished from the talk of children or 'child speech', which refers to the speech of children who are being enculturated into the linguistic community (Kelkar 1964), as well as from the speech used by adults under normal circumstances (Austerlitz 1956). 2. If a conventionalized BT subsystem is indeed found to exist, what are its formal linguistic features? Ferguson (197la, 1977, 1978) in his analysis of several dozen BT registers has demonstrated that BT subsystems share certain common linguistic characteristics (e.g., reduplication, simplification of consonant clusters, loss of unstressed syllables, prevalence of diminutive affixes, etc.). Does HBT share the same grammatical and prosodic features found to be common among BT registers throughout the world? Furthermore, what are the main topics or semantic areas found in HBT? Does HBT deal with the same topics Ferguson found to be most commonly reported in BT languages,