Acoustical cues and grammatical units in speech to two preverbal infants

Abstract

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.

Effects of deafness on acoustic characteristics of American English tense/lax vowels in maternal speech to infants

“…Thus, we analyzed vowel duration as a function of three utterance positions: utterance-non-final, utterance-final, and single-word utterance (e.g., "look"). A single-word utterance position was included because words in isolation make up 7%-15% of ID speech in American English (Soderstrom et al, 2008). We also examined the distribution of vowel tokens with respect to postvocalic consonantal contexts (voiced, voiceless, and no postvocalic consonant) in all three utterance positions in order to investigate whether such differences could be a confounding factor.…”

“…ID register. Because ID speech, unlike AD speech, is commonly characterized by some percentage of single word utterances (Brent and Siskind, 2001;Soderstrom et al, 2008), we also compared vowel duration in all three (non-final, final, and single-utterance) positions in ID speech only. We ran one-way ANOVAs for each vowel (/i/, /I/, /u/, and /U/) with one between-subject variable, Position(non-final, final, single utterance) with vowel duration as a dependent variable.…”

Prosody Perception in Typically Developing School-aged Children

“…Early mastery of question-statement distinction over contrastive stress patterns could be related to greater exposure and familiarity effects. The infant directed speech literature suggests that motherese includes large amount of emotional information and utterances in the form of question-statement [59][60][61]. In conversational English, contrastive stress usually occurs in the final word position of a sentence while the PEPS-C Contrastive Stress task uses stress on different word positions (e.g., I wanted a BLUE and green socks (emphasis on the first colour) vs.…”

Music therapy microanalysis of parent-infant interaction in a three-month-old infant later diagnosed with autism

“…Parentese has its own particular articulation, intonation, punctuation, pauses, repeated words, and cyclical variations of emotions and musical prosodic aspects: longer pauses, slower tempos, more repetitions, higher pitch, and exaggerated contours (Fernald, 1985;Saint-Georges et al, 2013). Lexical aspects are shorter utterances, simpler and redundant utterances, isolated words and phrases, a large number of questions, and frequent use of proper names (Durkin, Rutter, & Tucker, 1982;Soderstrom, Blossom, Foygel, & Morgan, 2008). Words and constructions derived from normal language often make use of the third person instead of the first or second one (Ferguson, 1964).…”

“…Lexical aspects include shorter utterances, simpler and redundant utterances, isolated words and phrases, a large number of questions, and the frequent use of proper names (Fisher & Tokura, 1995;Grieser & Kuhl, 1988;Durkin, Rutter, & Tucker, 1982;Soderstrom, Blossom, Foygel, & Morgan, 2008). Words and constructions are derived from normal language, such as the use of the third person instead of the first or second (Ferguson, 1964).…”