Acoustic-Lexical Characteristics of Child-Directed Speech Between 7 and 24 Months and Their Impact on Toddlers' Phonological Processing

Cychosz, Margaret; Edwards, Jan; Ratner, Nan Bernstein; Eaton, Catherine Torrington; Newman, Rochelle S.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.712647

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 111 publications

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“…The final picture was more complex: although all groups heard similar amounts and intensity (volume) of adult speech input, this differed systematically by age. In typical development, children hear more word types, tokens, and overall amounts of speech as they progress from infancy to preschoolhood (Cychosz, Edwards, Bernstein Ratner, Torrington Eaton, & Newman, 2021;Glas, Rossi, Hamdi-Sultan, Batailler, & Bellemmouche, 2018;Rowe, 2008Rowe, , 2012)-we replicated this developmental growth finding in both of our TH samples. However, there was no such age-related growth for the children with CIs, not by hearing age or chronological age.…”

Section: Caregiver Speech Inputsupporting

confidence: 70%

The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants

Cychosz¹,

Edwards²,

Munson³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Purpose: Children with severe to profound deafness who receive cochlear implants develop speech and language on a protracted timescale, owing to the absence of auditory input pre-implantation, and the degraded speech signal transmitted by the cochlear implant post-implantation. The home environment facilitates children’s speech-language development, yet it is relatively unknown how the home environment differs between children with cochlear implants and children with typical hearing. This study asked how hearing status impacts the everyday speech-language environments of preschoolers with cochlear implants, compared to their peers with typical hearing.Method: Eighteen children with cochlear implants (31-65 months) were matched by chronological age and hearing age to two groups of children with typical-hearing. Each child completed a long-form, naturalistic audio recording of their home language environment (appx. 16 hrs/child; >730 hours of observation) to evaluate the impact of hearing status upon early speech-language experience: speech input from adults, child vocal productivity, and caregiver-child interaction. The quantity, consistency, and experience-related growth of each component was computed and compared across hearing groups. We additionally assessed how measures of the environment predicted the children’s speech outcomes.Results: Unlike children with typical hearing, children with implants do not hear more speech input from caregivers as they age, and measures of the speech environment (words, interaction) do not predict their vocal outcomes as strongly. Nevertheless, all children, regardless of hearing status, engage in similar amounts of caregiver interaction. All children’s own speech production matures with age, but at a much slower rate for children with implants than hearing age matched controls. All children produce more contingent speech in response to louder caregiver input.Conclusions: Children with cochlear implants are exposed to and engage in similar amounts of language with caregivers as children with typical hearing. However, over development, the at-home speech environment does not appear to reflect developmental stages as closely for children with implants as those with typical hearing. Home-based language interventions should focus on the unique input-outcome relationships for this group of children with hearing loss.

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Section: Caregiver Speech Inputsupporting

confidence: 70%

The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants

Cychosz¹,

Edwards²,

Munson³

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Mimeau et al, 2020). Prosodic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and other modifications are systematically applied to adult speech (Cychosz et al, 2021;Moscoso del Prado et al, 2020;Roy et al, 2009;Snow, 1995) according to a range of child characteristics, primarily language ability (Dailey & Bergelson, 2023;Pancsofar, 2020) and age (Rowe & Snow, 2020). Overall parents engage in significant levels of fine-tuning to the child's lexical knowledge even at the level of individual words (Huttenlocher et al, 2010;Leung et al, 2021;Odijk & Gillis, 2021), and specific inflectional and syntactical constructions (Moscoso del Prado et al, 2020;Odijk & Gillis, 2023).…”

Section: Parents Adapt Their Child-directed Speechmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Overall parents engage in significant levels of fine-tuning to the child's lexical knowledge even at the level of individual words (Huttenlocher et al, 2010;Leung et al, 2021;Odijk & Gillis, 2021), and specific inflectional and syntactical constructions (Moscoso del Prado et al, 2020;Odijk & Gillis, 2023). Importantly, parental fine-tuning efforts affect child language (Cychosz et al, 2021;Denby & Yurovsky, 2019) and shape children's access to various forms and constructions (Casla et al, 2022).…”

Section: Parents Adapt Their Child-directed Speechmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parent–toddler play talk: Toddler speech is differentially associated with paternal and maternal speech in interaction

Quigley,

Nixon

2023

First Language

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Children’s speech is influenced by the speech they hear, in particular by the parental speech addressed directly to them. The aim of this study was to analyse toddlers’ speech with their parents and to investigate the influence of specific characteristics of child-directed speech on child speech in real time during mother–child and father–child dyadic interactions. Eighty-four children ( M = 24.11 months, SD = 1.37, 42 girls) and their parents were video-recorded in dyadic freeplay. Parent and child speech was compared on measures of quantity (number of words), quality (vocabulary diversity, proportion, and composition of nouns/verbs) and productivity or complexity. Overall findings reveal very similar speech produced by mothers and fathers with their toddlers and by toddlers with each parent, with the exception of vocabulary diversity patterns. Furthermore, the child-directed speech of mothers and fathers was differently associated with child speech in interaction. Findings suggest that children may be exposed to different lexical sets by mother and father and there may be added value for the child of engaging in separate dyadic interactions with mother and father. Implications for research include sampling child speech across contexts and conversational partners.

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“…Yet, like referential clarity, the phonetic clarity of infant‐directed speech is variable. While there are many uninterpretable pronunciations, there are also some instances with little coarticulation or reduction, where the segments of the word are distinctly realized (Cychosz et al., 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relating referential clarity and phonetic clarity in infant‐directed speech

Beech,

Swingley

2023

Developmental Science

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Psycholinguistic research on children's early language environments has revealed many potential challenges for language acquisition. One is that in many cases, referents of linguistic expressions are hard to identify without prior knowledge of the language. Likewise, the speech signal itself varies substantially in clarity, with some productions being very clear, and others being phonetically reduced, even to the point of uninterpretability. In this study, we sought to better characterize the language‐learning environment of American English‐learning toddlers by testing how well phonetic clarity and referential clarity align in infant‐directed speech. Using an existing Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) corpus with referential transparency measurements and adding new measures of phonetic clarity, we found that the phonetic clarity of words’ first mentions significantly predicted referential clarity (how easy it was to guess the intended referent from visual information alone) at that moment. Thus, when parents’ speech was especially clear, the referential semantics were also clearer. This suggests that young children could use the phonetics of speech to identify globally valuable instances that support better referential hypotheses, by homing in on clearer instances and filtering out less‐clear ones. Such multimodal “gems” offer special opportunities for early word learning.Research Highlights In parent‐infant interaction, parents’ referential intentions are sometimes clear and sometimes unclear; likewise, parents’ pronunciation is sometimes clear and sometimes quite difficult to understand. We find that clearer referential instances go along with clearer phonetic instances, more so than expected by chance. Thus, there are globally valuable instances (“gems”) from which children could learn about words’ pronunciations and words’ meanings at the same time. Homing in on clear phonetic instances and filtering out less‐clear ones would help children identify these multimodal “gems” during word learning.

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Acoustic-Lexical Characteristics of Child-Directed Speech Between 7 and 24 Months and Their Impact on Toddlers' Phonological Processing

Cited by 8 publications

References 111 publications

The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants

The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants

Parent–toddler play talk: Toddler speech is differentially associated with paternal and maternal speech in interaction

Relating referential clarity and phonetic clarity in infant‐directed speech

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