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Acoustic-phonetic differences between infant- and adult-directed speech: the role of stress and utterance position

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2014

YUANYUAN WANG ,
AMANDA SEIDL  and
ALEJANDRINA CRISTIA
YUANYUAN WANG
Affiliation:
Linguistics, Purdue University
AMANDA SEIDL*
Affiliation:
Speech Language & Hearing Sciences, Purdue University
ALEJANDRINA CRISTIA
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS, IEC-ENS, EHESS
*
[*]Address for correspondence: Amanda Seidl, Speech Language & Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, 500 Oval Dr., West Lafayette, IN 47907. e-mail: aseidl@purdue.edu
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Abstract

Previous studies have shown that infant-directed speech (IDS) differs from adult-directed speech (ADS) on a variety of dimensions. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether acoustic differences between IDS and ADS in English are modulated by prosodic structure. We compared vowels across the two registers (IDS, ADS) in both stressed and unstressed syllables, and in both utterance-medial and -final positions. Vowels in target bisyllabic trochees in the speech of twenty mothers of 4- and 11-month-olds were analyzed. While stressed and unstressed vowels differed between IDS and ADS for a measure of F0, and trended in similar directions for vowel peripherality, neither set differed in duration. These profiles held for both utterance-medial and -final words.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , July 2015 , pp. 821 - 842
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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