The Structure of Japanese Baby Talk

The phonological forms and perceived functions of janyarrp, the Gurindji ‘baby talk’ register

“…These studies, carried out with transcription data, not instrumental analysis, reported baby talk patterns to include consonant cluster reduction, consonant harmony (place or nasality), consonant fronting, labialization, replacement of rhotics, stopping of fricatives, and initial or final deletion. Relevantly to the present paper, coronals were reported to be palatalized in baby talk in Warlpiri (Laughren, 1984), Japanese (Chew, 1969), South Estonian (Pajusalu, 2001), and Huichol, among Wixaritari people (Grimes, 1955). In East Cree and in Warlpiri, both languages without contrastive stop voicing, stops have been reported as voiced in baby talk (Jones, 1988;O'Shannessy, 2011).…”

“…The underlying theoretical orientation of this research was that understanding the nature of the input to children would be critical to understanding how children develop language. A series of crosslinguistic studies thus investigated the features of caregivers' (especially mothers') talk to infants and young children, with a focus on the phonological patterns resembling immature child speech and the special baby talk lexicon (Casagrande, 1948;Chew, 1969;Cruttenden, 1994;Ferguson, 1964Ferguson, , 1977Grimes, 1955;Shankara Bhat, 1967). These studies, carried out with transcription data, not instrumental analysis, reported baby talk patterns to include consonant cluster reduction, consonant harmony (place or nasality), consonant fronting, labialization, replacement of rhotics, stopping of fricatives, and initial or final deletion.…”

Language‐Specific Developmental Differences in Speech Production: A Cross‐Language Acoustic Study

“…Second, more experience with words beginning with /s/ could allow children to extract away the sound segment earlier than other, less commonly used speech sounds. In Japanese, although /s/ and /∫/ are about equally frequent, caregivers frequently palatalize their /s/ sound as a sound symbolism for smallness or cuteness in addressing young children, a process resulting in more /∫/‐like input than suggested by lexicon (Chew, 1969). Palatalization in child‐directed speech in Japanese could also account for the apparent discrepancy between fewer number of familiar /∫/‐initial words in JCDI and the earlier emergence of /∫/‐like forms in children’s speech.…”

Patterns and scales of expressive palatalization: Experimental evidence from Japanese

“…21;Hamano 1998:186-187). The two processes are also expected to share some characteristics, given the fact that mimetic vocabulary is used very frequently in child-directed speech (at a rate about five times higher than with adults; Imai, Kita, Nagumo and Okada 2008) and given the high incidence of (non-mimetic) reduplication in babytalk (Chew 1969;cf. Mazuka, Kondo, and Hayashi 2008).…”