Levels of prominence in Spanish infant-directed speech

Abstract

Research on Spanish prosody in adult-directed speech (ADS) (Ortega-Llebaria & Prieto 2005, Ortega-Llebaria & Prieto 2011) shows evidence for three acoustic levels of prominence: stressed and focused, stressed and unfocused, and unstressed and unfocused. We tested whether Spanish infant-directed speech (IDS) contains the same levels of prosodic prominence as ADS. In order to test this hypothesis, 30-minute play sessions between adult Spanish-speaking females of Latin American origin (n = 12) and 12-month old infants were recorded. We extracted target words from the recordings containing stressed and unstressed /a/, /e/, /i/, and /o/ in non-final position. Voicesauce (Shue et al 2011) was then used to obtain acoustic correlates of stress in Spanish: pitch, duration, intensity. We also labeled pitch accents using SpToBI conventions (Estebas Vilaplana & Prieto 2009). Latent class analyses to be performed on the data will determine the number of distinct prominence levels present in Spanish IDS as realized by Latin American speakers.