Infants’ Lexical Processing: Independent Contributions of Attentional and Clarity Cues

Lovcevic, Irena; Burnham, Denis K; Kalashnikova, Marina

doi:10.1080/15475441.2022.2149402

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 107 publications

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“…The linear increase in vowel space expansion with infants' age contrasts with the majority of previous studies (Cox et al, 2022;Lovcevic et al, 2022; but see Dodane & Al-Tamimi, 2007), and suggests that Norwegian caregivers produce more peripheral vowel averages to infants' as they are becoming increasingly more advanced language users, perhaps to facilitate their language learning (Kalashnikova & Burnham, 2018;Kuhl et al, 1997;Liu et al, 2003). However, our results also demonstrate that IDS, as compared to ADS, was characterised by more underlying variability in vowel production, and less distinctive/more overlapping vowel categories, that did not vary as a function of infant age.…”

Section: Figure 15contrasting

confidence: 90%

“…While there are studies that report facilitating effects of IDS prosody on linguistic skills in older infants (e.g., Graf Estes & Hurley, 2013;Ma et al, 2011), these effects could be confounded with other segmental features present in the stimuli, such as vowel space expansion, which has been associated with older infants' vocabulary size (Hartman et al, 2017) and word recognition (Song et al, 2010). In fact, a recent experimental study reported that Australian English 18-month-old infants showed better word recognition accuracy when exposed to stimuli containing vowel space expansion without prosodic exaggeration as compared to stimuli with prosodic exaggeration and without vowel space expansion (Lovcevic et al, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A longitudinal investigation of the acoustic properties of infant-directed speech from 6 to 18 months

Rosslund,

Mayor,

Mundry

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Caregivers often modulate their speech when interacting with infants, adapting a register that has been suggested to have attentional, affective, and didactic purposes. The present preregistered study examined the longitudinal trajectories of a diverse range of acoustic features of infant-directed speech (IDS), and compared these to adult-directed speech (ADS), in Norwegian parents of 6–18- month-old infants. Sixty-nine families participated. Throughout five lab visits across one year, par- ents were recorded reading a picture-book to their infant (IDS), and to an experimenter (ADS). The book was designed to tightly control for the linguistic content and context of speech between partic- ipants, timepoints, and registers. Analyses of a total of 54,594 vowels and 22,958 phrases revealed, first, an overall effect of register: Parents used higher pitch, wider pitch range, slower articulation rate, longer vowel duration, and more variable and less distinct vowels in IDS than in ADS. Second, significant register-by-age interactions indicated that parents’ IDS, compared to their ADS, featured wider pitch range, larger vowel space areas, and shorter vowel duration in older as compared to younger infants, while pitch, articulation rate, and vowel variability and distinctiveness remained relatively stable with age. Results are discussed in the context of the proposed functions of IDS.

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Section: Figure 15contrasting

confidence: 90%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A longitudinal investigation of the acoustic properties of infant-directed speech from 6 to 18 months

Rosslund,

Mayor,

Mundry

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…More extreme articulation of the corner vowels that delimitate the vowel space naturally leads to its expansion, which, hypothetically, allows for a broader distribution of other vowels, and, thus, enhances the distance between the nearby categories (Liu et al, 2003). In line with this hypothesis, studies have shown that more prominent vowel space expansion in mothers' IDS, as compared to ADS, was related to larger vocabulary in 18-month-old toddlers (Kalashnikova & Burnham, 2018), improvements in language outcomes in toddlers with cochlear implants (Dilley et al, 2020), better consonant discrimination in 9 and 12-month-old infants (Kalashnikova & Carreiras, 2021;Liu et al, 2003), better word recognition in 19-month-old toddlers (Song et al, 2010, who additionally reported a positive effect of slow speaking rate), also when controlling for pitch modulations (Lovcevic et al, 2022). More generally, higher exposure to mothers' IDS at 12 months of age was associated with larger vocabulary at 24 months of age (Ramírez-Esparza et al, 2014), suggesting, together with the other above-mentioned studies, that mothers' IDS promotes early language learning.…”

Section: Facilitating Role Of (Mothers') Ids On Direct and Indirect M...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mothers’ and fathers’ infant-directed speech have similar acoustic properties, but these are not associated with direct or indirect measures of word comprehension in 8-month-old infants

ROSSLUND,

HAGELUND,

MAYOR

et al. 2023

J. Child Lang.

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Previous research on infant-directed speech (IDS) and its role in infants’ language development has largely focused on mothers, with fathers being investigated scarcely. Here we examine the acoustics of IDS as compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) in Norwegian mothers and fathers to 8-month-old infants, and whether these relate to direct (eye-tracking) and indirect (parental report) measures of infants’ word comprehension. Forty-five parent-infant dyads participated in the study. Parents (24 mothers, 21 fathers) were recorded reading a picture book to their infant (IDS), and to an experimenter (ADS), ensuring identical linguistic context across speakers and registers. Results showed that both mothers’ and fathers’ IDS had exaggerated prosody, expanded vowel spaces, as well as more variable and less distinct vowels. We found no evidence that acoustic features of parents’ speech were associated with infants’ word comprehension. Potential reasons for the lack of such a relationship are discussed.

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“…Here, we focus on one of these acoustic features, vowel hyperarticulation. Vowel hyperarticulation has been suggested to scaffold language acquisition by facilitating infants' speech processing (Lovcevic et al, 2022;Peter et al, 2016;Song et al, 2010;Zhang et al, 2011) and vocabulary development (Dilley et al, 2020;Hartman et al, 2017;Lovcevic et al, 2020;Marklund et al, 2021). However, there is a lack of consistency across studies as well as the absence of vowel hyperarticulation in some languages challenging the robustness of this IDS feature.…”

Section: Vowel Hyperarticulation In Infant-directed Speechmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vowel-hyperarticulation in Infant-directed Speech: A Multi-method Meta-analysis

Lovcevic,

Benders,

Tsuji

et al. 2023

Preprint

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There is a long-standing debate about the extent to which vowel hyperarticulation, the production of acoustically exaggerated vowels, occurs in Infant-Directed Speech (IDS). This exaggeration has been argued to result in clearer speech sounds that are easier for infants to process and might be positively related to infants’ linguistic outcomes. However, previous findings regarding the presence of vowel hyperarticulation in IDS are seemingly inconsistent and contradictory, making it hard to advance our understanding of the role of hyperarticulation in language development and consequently the potential functions/roles of IDS in language acquisition. Thus, we adopted a systematic review and meta-analytic approach to investigate the robustness of vowel hyperarticulation in IDS and identify sources of heterogeneity in the literature. We employed four complementary meta-analytic approaches and evaluated the robustness of results across the different choices. We performed both traditional (Frequentist) and Bayesian meta-analyses on, first, methodologically consistent studies (17 studies, 36 effect sizes), and then, all studies of vowel hyperarticulation in IDS irrespective of the method (33 studies, 75 effect sizes). Findings indicate the presence of vowel hyperarticulation in IDS compared to ADS (effect sizes ranging from 0.35 to 0.62), as well as systematic and unsystematic variability due to e.g., cross-linguistic variability and methods employed, making it difficult to identify specific factors associated with stronger vowel hyperarticulation. The quantitative results combined with systematic review of the literature also enables important methodological insights, which we summarize into recommended practices such as enlarging sample sizes and explicitly incorporating sources of heterogeneity in analyses.

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Infants’ Lexical Processing: Independent Contributions of Attentional and Clarity Cues

Cited by 3 publications

References 107 publications

A longitudinal investigation of the acoustic properties of infant-directed speech from 6 to 18 months

A longitudinal investigation of the acoustic properties of infant-directed speech from 6 to 18 months

Mothers’ and fathers’ infant-directed speech have similar acoustic properties, but these are not associated with direct or indirect measures of word comprehension in 8-month-old infants

Vowel-hyperarticulation in Infant-directed Speech: A Multi-method Meta-analysis

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