Vowels in infant-directed speech: More breathy and more variable, but not clearer

Miyazawa, Keiji; Shinya, Takahito; Martin, Andrés; Kikuchi, Hideaki; Mazuka, Reiko

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.003

Cited by 53 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Furthermore, even in cases in which vowel hyperarticulation is present, it has been found to co‐occur with a high degree of within‐category variability, which may exacerbate the difficulty of infants’ task of learning discrete phonological categories in their native language (Cristia & Seidl, ; McMurray, Kovack‐Lesh, Goodwin, & McEron, ). This view has been supported by computational evidence demonstrating that models perform more successfully in tasks of phonetic categorization when trained with ADS compared to IDS (Martin et al, ; McMurray et al, ; Miyazawa, Shinya, Martin, Kikuchi, & Mazuka, ; but see De Boer & Kuhl, ; Werker et al, ). In light of these findings, it could be argued that there are no direct implications of the absence of vowel hyperarticulation in IDS to infants at risk for dyslexia for early linguistic development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Infant‐directed speech to infants at risk for dyslexia: A novel cross‐dyad design

Kalashnikova

Goswami

Burnham

2020

Infancy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When mothers speak to infants at risk for developmental dyslexia, they do not hyperarticulate vowels in their infant‐directed speech (IDS). Here, we used an innovative cross‐dyad design to investigate whether the absence of vowel hyperarticulation in IDS to at‐risk infants is a product of maternal infant‐directed behavior or of infants’ parent‐directed cues. Interactions between mothers and infants who were at risk or not at risk for dyslexia were recorded in three conditions: when mothers interacted with (a) their own infants, (b) infants who were not their own but of the same risk status, and (c) infants who were not their own and of the opposite risk status. This design revealed both infant and parent effects. Mothers of not‐at‐risk infants hyperarticulated vowels significantly more when speaking to not‐at‐risk than to at‐risk infants. In contrast, mothers of at‐risk infants hyperarticulated vowels significantly less than NAR mothers, and this was irrespective of infant status. Mothers of not‐at‐risk infants thus adjusted their IDS to the infant's risk status, while mothers of at‐risk infants did not. We suggest that IDS is determined reciprocally by characteristics of both partners in the dyad: Both infant and maternal factors are essential for the vowel hyperarticulation component of IDS.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Infant‐directed speech to infants at risk for dyslexia: A novel cross‐dyad design

Kalashnikova

Goswami

Burnham

2020

Infancy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…inadvertently sacrifice phonetic precision in order to make infants more comfortable and/or more receptive to the input (Papoušek & Hwang, 1991;Reilly & Bellugi, 1996). Increased phonetic variability in IDS at the phonemic level may stem from a slower speaking rate (McMurray et al, 2013), or from exaggerated prosodic variations (Fernald et al, 1989;Soderstrom, 2007;Martin et al, 2016), or possibly from gestural modifications that convey positive affect, such as smiling (Benders, 2013), increased breathiness (Miyazawa et al, 2017) or even a vocal tract that is shortened to resemble the child's own (Kalashnikova, Carignan, & Burnham, 2017). According to a study by Trueswell et al (2016), successful word learning interactions tend to be those in which actions performed by both caregivers and infants are precisely synchronised, with time-locking of gaze, speech and gestures.…”

Section: R a F T Are Words In Infant-directed Speech Easier To Learn?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Words Easier to Learn From Infant‐ Than Adult‐Directed Speech? A Quantitative Corpus‐Based Investigation

et al. 2018

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: The IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.

show abstract

“…The current study gives further insights into the complex issue of differences between ADS and IDS and how they affect the process of early language acquisition. Previous studies on the same corpus have shown an adverse effect of IDS when looking at phoneme discrimination [8], as well as a less clear vowel class separation due to an increased intra-class variability [23]. While at segmental level no advantage of IDS was observed, when looking at other linguistic levels, for instance prosodic boundary detection [24] or lexical segmentation [25], IDS does have an advantage.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Nasal Consonant Discrimination in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech

Ludusan¹,

Jorschick²,

Mazuka³

2019

Interspeech 2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is thought to play a facilitating role in language acquisition, by simplifying the input infants receive. In particular, the hypothesis that the acoustic level is enhanced to make the input more clear for infants, has been extensively studied in the case of vowels, but less so in the case of consonants. An investigation into how nasal consonants can be discriminated in infant-compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) was performed, on a corpus of Japanese mother-infant spontaneous conversations, by examining all bilabial and alveolar nasals occurring in intervocalic position. The Pearson correlation between corresponding spectrum slices of nasal consonants, in identical vowel contexts, was employed as similarity measure and a statistical model was fit using this information. It revealed a decrease in similarity between the nasal classes, in IDS compared to ADS, although the effect was not statistically significant. We confirmed these results, using an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to discriminate between the two nasal classes, obtaining similar classification performance in IDS and ADS. We discuss our findings in the context of the current literature on infant-directed speech.

show abstract

Vowels in infant-directed speech: More breathy and more variable, but not clearer

Cited by 53 publications

References 36 publications

Infant‐directed speech to infants at risk for dyslexia: A novel cross‐dyad design

Infant‐directed speech to infants at risk for dyslexia: A novel cross‐dyad design

Are Words Easier to Learn From Infant‐ Than Adult‐Directed Speech? A Quantitative Corpus‐Based Investigation

Nasal Consonant Discrimination in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About