No abstract

We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: The IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.

It is well known that prosodic information is used by infants in early language acquisition. In particular, prosodic boundaries have been shown to help infants with sentence and wordlevel segmentation. In this study, we extend an unsupervised method for word segmentation to include information about prosodic boundaries. The boundary information used was either derived from oracle data (handannotated), or extracted automatically with a system that employs only acoustic cues for boundary detection. The approach was tested on two different languages, English and Japanese, and the results show that boundary information helps word segmentation in both cases. The performance gain obtained for two typologically distinct languages shows the robustness of prosodic information for word segmentation. Furthermore, the improvements are not limited to the use of oracle information, similar performances being obtained also with automatically extracted boundaries.