The impact of the quality of maternal speech on infants’ segmentation abilities

Abstract

Across cultures, infants are typically addressed using a special speech register, called infant-directed speech (IDS). Infants appear to benefit from being addressed in this register, although there seem to be some cross-linguistic differences in their learning from IDS. One possible explanation for these differences is that children from different backgrounds are addressed in a less exaggerated register than standard American English IDS. Against this background, we examined whether German 7.5-month-olds are able to segment words from exaggerated IDS and standard German IDS. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the potential long-term consequences of continued exposure to less or more exaggerated IDS, we also examined the impact of individual differences in maternal IDS on early speech segmentation. We found that 7.5-month-old infants were able to segment words from exaggerated, but not from standard German IDS. A potential explanation for this result comes from our finding that infants whose mothers used more exaggerated IDS were able to also segment words from standard German IDS. Taken together, the current study a) underlines the importance of IDS in early language acquisition, b) demonstrates successful exaggerated IDS segmentation abilities, and c) presents a possible explanation for cross-linguistic differences in infants’ segmentation abilities reported in the literature.