The prosody of maternal speech: infant age and context related changes

Stern, Daniel N.; Spieker, Susan J.; Barnett, R. K.; MacKain, Kristine

doi:10.1017/s0305000900005092

Cited by 337 publications

(321 citation statements)

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“…Importantly, degree of reduction may change across age or developmental stage of the child, like many other variables in infant-directed speech (e.g. Stern, Spieker, Barnett & MacKain, 1983). These studies therefore leave open the question whether speech directed at young infants contains highly reduced pronunciation variants.…”

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Pronunciation Variation in Infant-Directed Speech: Phonetic Reduction of Two Highly Frequent Words

Lahey

Ernestus

2013

Language Learning and Development

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In spontaneous conversations between adults, words are often pronounced with fewer segments or syllables than their citation forms. The question arises whether infant-directed speech also contains phonetic reduction. If so, infants would be presented with speech input that enables them to acquire reduced variants from an early age. This study compared speech directed at 11-and 12-month-old infants with adult-directed conversational speech and adult-directed read speech. In an acoustic study, 216 tokens of the Dutch words allemaal and helemaal from speech corpora were analyzed for duration, number of syllables and vowel quality. In a perception study, adult participants rated these same materials for reduction and provided phonetic transcriptions. The results show that these two words are frequently reduced in infant-directed speech, and that their degree of reduction is comparable to conversational adult-directed speech. These findings suggest that lexical representations for reduced pronunciation variants can be acquired early in linguistic development. 3An important component of language acquisition is the learning of words and their meanings.Before infants can attach meanings to words, they must acquire the ability to recognize a given word across different contexts. This is a complicated task, as each token of a word is acoustically different. Pronunciation variation can, for instance, be caused by speaker gender, voice characteristics and accent or dialectical variation. This raises the question of how infants learn to cope with pronunciation variation.In spontaneous conversations between adults, another common cause of pronunciation variation is reduction: words are often pronounced with fewer segments or syllables than their citation forms (for an introduction to the phenomenon of reduction, see Ernestus & Warner, 2011). For instance, the word yesterday can be pronounced in South-West American English as [jɛʃei]. Phonetic reduction leads to great variability in speech. Johnson (2004) showed that in a corpus of American English, no less than 20% of word tokens were pronounced with at least one segment missing, and 6% with at least one syllable missing. Similar results have been found for Dutch spontaneous speech (Schuppler, Ernestus, Scharenborg & Boves, 2011). In this study, we investigate whether highly reduced forms are prevalent in infant-directed speech, and we discuss the implications of this type of pronunciation variation for the building of a lexicon.Despite the high frequency of occurrence of reduced pronunciation variants, these forms normally do not seem to hinder communication. Adult listeners appear to understand these variants without any problem, at least when they are heard in context (Ernestus, Baayen & Schreuder, 2002). This raises the question of when infants can start learning to process reduced variants. In this study we investigated whether words are also reduced in speech to 11-and 12-month-old infants, that is whether highly reduced pronunciation variants occur in infant-di...

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Pronunciation Variation in Infant-Directed Speech: Phonetic Reduction of Two Highly Frequent Words

Lahey

Ernestus

2013

Language Learning and Development

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“…Stern et al, 1983 ;Fernald, Taeschner, Dunn, Papousek, de BoyssonBardies & Fukui, 1989). Fernald et al (1989) found that these characteristics are manifest cross-linguistically and in both mothers' and fathers' speech, although there are perhaps differences in degree.…”

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Acoustical cues and grammatical units in speech to two preverbal infants

et al. 2008

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A B S T R A C TThe current study examines the syntactic and prosodic characteristics of the maternal speech to two infants between six and ten months. Consistent with previous work, we find infant-directed speech to be characterized by generally short utterances, isolated words and phrases, and large numbers of questions, but longer utterances are also found. Prosodic information provides cues to grammatical units not only at utterance boundaries, but also at utterance-internal clause boundaries. Subject-verb phrase boundaries in questions also show reliable prosodic cues, although those of declaratives do not. Prosodic information may thus play an important role in providing preverbal infants with information about the grammatically relevant word groupings. Furthermore, questions may play an important role in infants' discovery of verb phrases in English.

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“…Singh et al, 2002) and taking the language skills of the listener into account (cf. Snow, 1977;Phillips, 1973;Stern, Spieker, Barnett & MacKain, 1983), and if so, what is the functional role of these additional properties.…”

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Is infant-directed speech interesting because it is surprising? – Linking properties of IDS to statistical learning and attention at the prosodic level

Räsänen¹,

Kakouros²,

Söderström³

2017

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The exaggerated intonation and special rhythmic properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been hypothesized to attract infants' attention to the speech stream. However, there has been little work actually connecting the properties of IDS to models of attentional processing or perceptual learning. A number of such attention models suggest that surprising or novel perceptual inputs attract attention, where novelty can be operationalized as the statistical (un)predictability of the stimulus in the given context. Since prosodic patterns such as F0 contours are accessible to young infants who are also known to be adept statistical learners, the present paper investigates a hypothesis that F0 contours in IDS are less predictable than those in adult-directed speech (ADS), given previous exposure to both speaking styles, thereby potentially tapping into basic attentional mechanisms of the listeners in a similar manner that relative probabilities of other linguistic patterns are known to modulate attentional processing in infants and adults. Computational modeling analyses with naturalistic IDS and ADS speech from matched speakers and contexts show that IDS intonation has lower overall temporal predictability even when the F0 contours of both speaking styles are normalized to have equal means and variances. A closer analysis reveals that there is a tendency of IDS intonation to be less predictable at the end of short utterances, whereas ADS exhibits more stable average predictability patterns across the full extent of the utterances. The difference between IDS and ADS persists even when the proportion of IDS and ADS exposure is varied substantially, simulating different relative amounts of IDS heard in different family and cultural environments. Exposure to IDS is also found to be more efficient for predicting ADS intonation contours in new utterances than exposure to the equal amount of ADS speech. This indicates that the more variable prosodic contours of IDS also generalize to ADS, and may therefore enhance prosodic learning in infancy. Overall, the study suggests that one reason behind infant preference for IDS could be its higher information value at the prosodic level, as measured by the amount of surprisal in the F0 contours. This provides the first formal link between the properties of IDS and the models of attentional processing and statistical learning in the brain. However, this finding does not rule out the possibility that other differences between the IDS and ADS also play a role.

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The prosody of maternal speech: infant age and context related changes

Cited by 337 publications

References 11 publications

Pronunciation Variation in Infant-Directed Speech: Phonetic Reduction of Two Highly Frequent Words

Pronunciation Variation in Infant-Directed Speech: Phonetic Reduction of Two Highly Frequent Words

Acoustical cues and grammatical units in speech to two preverbal infants

Is infant-directed speech interesting because it is surprising? – Linking properties of IDS to statistical learning and attention at the prosodic level

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