Fathers' infant‐directed speech and its effects on child language development

Abstract

Infant-directed speech (IDS), a speaking style distinguished by its higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation, has been documented in speech directed towards infants across many cultures and languages. Previous research shows that IDS in the context of parent-infant interactions is associated with advances in children's language learning. While we have long known that fathers, like mothers, produce IDS, most research on IDS to this day has focussed exclusively on female (maternal) speech. In light of the recent societal changes which have increased fathers' time spent in handson activities with children, I argue that the research on IDS needs to move away from using the maternal template. I first describe why IDS plays a central role in language development. I then outline known similarities and differences between paternal and maternal IDS, and point to potential biases and challenges within the research that has been conducted so far. Finally, I outline why investigators should strive to include fathers in research on IDS, and conclude with recommendations for follow-up work that can help advance our understanding of fathers' contributions to children's linguistic development.

Mothers’ and fathers’ infant-directed speech have similar acoustic properties, but these are not associated with direct or indirect measures of word comprehension in 8-month-old infants

“…Norwegian IDS and the current study Norwegian speech is phonologically complex and uses formants, pitch accents (that is, variation in intonation, exemplified by [ 1 hendəɾ] hands vs [ 2 hendəɾ] happens), and lengthening ([tα:k] roof vs [tαk] thank you) to distinguish vowel-contrasting minimal word pairs (for more on Norwegian phonology, see Kristoffersen, 2000), suggesting that Norwegian-learning infants need to tune to a remarkable variation of acoustic cues (Kartushina & Mayor, 2019, 2022. The current knowledge on Norwegian parents' IDS comes from two unique samples from two distinct dialectal 1 and geographical areas: six mother-infant dyads, aged 0-6 months, in Central Norway (Englund, 2018;Englund & Behne, 2006) and 21 parent-toddler dyads (including five fathers), aged 18 months, in Northern Norway (Rosslund et al, 2022).…”

“…These prosodic and segmental adaptations, commonly referred to as infant-directed speech (IDS) and found across a number of languages (Cox et al, 2022), have been suggested to make speech more attractive to infants (The ManyBabies Consortium, 2020), to foster social-emotional bonding (Benders, 2013;Kalashnikova et al, 2017), and to facilitate language learning, by making speech clearer, among others (Golinkoff et al, 2015). Yet, an unquestionable focus on mothers' over fathers' speech (Ferjan Ramírez, 2022), inconsistent results on the role of IDS in language development (Suttora et al, 2017), and suggestions that IDS might be less clear than adult-directed speech (ADS) (Miyazawa et al, 2017) call for a thorough examination of the acoustic properties of IDS, in both parents, and their potential impact on infants' language outcomes using direct (eye-tracking) and indirect (parental report) measures.…”

Mothers’ and fathers’ infant-directed speech have similar acoustic properties, but these are not associated with direct or indirect measures of word comprehension in 8–month-old infants

“…Norwegian speech is phonologically complex and uses formants, pitch-accents ([ˈhendəɾ] hands vs [ 2 hendəɾ] happens), and lengthening ([tα:k] roof vs [tαk] thank you) to distinguish vowel-contrasting minimal word pairs, suggesting that Norwegian-learning infants need to tune in to a remarkable variation of acoustic cues (Kartushina & Mayor, 2019;2022). The current knowledge on Norwegian parents' IDS comes from two unique samples from two distinct dialectal and geographical areas: six mother-infant dyads, aged 0-6 months, in Central Norway (Englund & Behne, 2006;Englund, 2018) and 21 parent-toddler dyads, aged 18 months, in Northern Norway (Rosslund et al, 2022), the latter sample includes five fathers.…”

“…At the group level, infants showed no word comprehension in the IPL task. Although word comprehension as indexed by the IPL task has been reported already at 6 months of age in infants learning American English (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012), Norwegian infants might need more time to form robust representations (Kartushina & Mayor, 2019;2022). As such, the association between individual differences in word comprehension and the acoustic features of parents' speech might be limited in 8-month-old Norwegian infants, and may only appear at later ages, as revealed in older infants and in other languages (see Introduction for a review of studies showing such a relationship).…”

“…These adaptations, commonly referred to as infant-directed speech (IDS) and found across a number of languages (Cox et al, 2022a), have been suggested to make speech more attractive to infants (The ManyBabies Consortium, 2020) and to facilitate language learning (Golinkoff et al, 2015). Yet, an unquestionable focus on mothers' over fathers' speech (Ferjan Ramírez, 2022), inconsistent results on the role of IDS on language development (Suttora et al, 2017), and suggestions that IDS might be less clear than adult-directed speech (ADS) (Miyazawa et al, 2017) call for a thorough examination of the acoustic properties of IDS, in both parents, and their potential impact on infants' language outcomes when using direct (eye-tracking) and indirect (parental report) measures.…”