Acoustic correlates of stress in Spanish infant-directed speech

Abstract

In infant speech research, children's input in often examined to determine at what age their production is affected by their language experience. In this study, we examined production of stress in Spanish infant-directed speech. Although the correlates of stress in English infant-directed speech have been examined, the same has not been done for Spanish. We analyzed infant-directed speech from eight native Spanish-speaking adults from Central and South America. The infant-directed speech was acquired by recording half-hour sessions of adults interacting in Spanish with 12-month-old infants. The acoustic measures examined to determine stress were: pitch, duration, and intensity. These measures were selected because they have been shown to be the most consistent correlates of stress in Spanish and English adult-directed speech. These measures were taken over a group of six target words: mama, globo, leche, zapato, mira, and agua. These target words allowed us to examine each of the vowels (/a/, /e/, and /o/) in both stressed and unstressed position, as well as in varying word positions. With these data we hope to discover how stress is instantiated in Spanish infant-directed speech in order to provide a baseline for future investigations of babbling by Spanish-learning infants.

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

“…Specifically, the first question is whether the registers differ once any enhancement in lexical stressed syllables has been accounted for. This is relevant because Albin and Echols (1996) indicated that stressed and final unstressed syllables differed to a greater extent in IDS than ADS, regardless of their position in the utterance (see also Jacobson, Ward & Sundara, 2011, for evidence on the acoustic cues to stress in Spanish IDS). Thus, even once the confound with higher incidence of boundaries has been addressed, it remains possible that much of the differences between the registers could be due to the enhancement of stress specifically.…”