Temporal Variability and Stability in Infant-Directed Sung Speech: Evidence for Language-specific Patterns

Abstract

In this paper, sung speech is used as a methodological tool to explore temporal variability in the timing of word-internal consonants and vowels. It is hypothesized that temporal variability/stability becomes clearer under the varying rhythmical conditions induced by song. This is explored crosslinguistically in German -a language that exhibits a potential vocalic quantity distinction -and the non-quantity languages French and Russian. Songs by non-professional singers, i.e. parents that sang to their infants aged 2 to 13 months in a non-laboratory setting, were recorded and analyzed. Vowel and consonant durations at syllable contacts of trochaic word types with ¦CVCV or ¦CVːCV structure were measured under varying rhythmical conditions. Evidence is provided that in German non-professional singing, the two syllable structures can be differentiated by two distinct temporal variability patterns: vocalic variability (and consonantal stability) was found to be dominant in ¦CVːCV structures whereas consonantal variability (and vocalic stability) was characteristic for ¦CVCV structures. In French and Russian, however, only vocalic variability seemed to apply. Additionally, findings suggest that the different temporal patterns found in German were also supported by the stability pattern at the tonal level. These results point to subtle (supra) segmental timing mechanisms in sung speech that affect temporal targets according to the specific prosodic nature of the language in question.

Temporal variability in sung productions of adolescents who stutter

“…Slower speech tempo is usually associated with longer instead of shorter VOTs (e.g., Kessinger & Blumstein, 1998). Hence, the pattern of temporal reduction in singing is likely to be induced by prolonged voicing of sonorant segments (e.g., Brayton & Conture, 1978;Colcord & Adams, 1979;Di Simoni, 1974;Riley & Ingham, 2000) and the temporal compression of voiceless consonantal material (VOT, gap duration; see Falk, 2011 for an overview on temporal variability of consonants and vowels in sung German speech). The finding is also in line with results from Howell and Sackin (2001), showing that singing produces rather local than global speech rate changes.…”

Infants Prefer Infant‐Directed Song Over Speech

“…The Russian ID material (10 mothers) was derived from Falk (, ). The English ID corpus (eight mothers) was recorded by Trehub (personal correspondence).…”

“…Both forms of vocalizations have high affective value and engage infants' attention more effectively than AD communication (e.g., Kitamura & Lam, ). ID singing and ID speaking both utilize words and exploit similar acoustic resources (e.g., fundamental frequency, temporal sequences of events) to build their prosodic structures (e.g., Falk, ; Trainor, ). However, adults readily distinguish between speech and song as two different stimulus categories, such that different neural activation patterns are found in some areas of the brain for singing compared to speech (e.g., Callan et al., ; Ozdemir, Norton, & Schlaug, ).…”

Singing to infants matters: Early singing interactions affect musical preferences and facilitate vocabulary building

“…Thus, it appears that musical and linguistic features are intertwined in early communication with infants, and deeply rooted in emotional meanings (Franco, 1997). In cross-linguistic analyses, Falk (2007; 2011a) highlighted that ID-singing presents a number of characteristics very similar to ID-speech (e.g., higher pitch) as well as containing phonetic and prosodic information that is language-specific: hence, providing rich material for native language learning. In particular, higher similarity is found between melodic contours in ID-song and ID-speech produced in play, rather than soothing, contexts (Falk, 2011b), that is when babies are alert and actively engaged.…”