Universality and specificity in infant-directed speech: Pitch modifications as a function of infant age and sex in a tonal and non-tonal language

A connectionist study on the role of pitch in infant-directed speech

“…22 Both pitch height and contour differences are important for distinguishing tones. 23 Pitch exaggeration has been observed in IDS of tone languages, 24,25 even though the degree of exaggeration is slightly less than that in non-tonal IDS. 25 Liu, Tsao, and Kuhl 24 suggested that IDS enhances features that are presumably distinctive for tones.…”

“…23 Pitch exaggeration has been observed in IDS of tone languages, 24,25 even though the degree of exaggeration is slightly less than that in non-tonal IDS. 25 Liu, Tsao, and Kuhl 24 suggested that IDS enhances features that are presumably distinctive for tones. The authors analyzed spontaneous speech of Mandarin-speaking mothers to their 10-12-month-olds and observed higher pitch level, expanded pitch range and longer duration at the syllable level, syllables being the tonal bearing units.…”

Infant-directed speech as a window into the dynamic nature of phonology

“…For example, IDS is characterized by overall higher pitch (Ferguson 1964;Fernald and Simon 1984), a greater pitch range (Fernald and Simon 1984), larger pitch peaks on focused words (Fernald and Mazzie 1991), slower speech rate (Bryant and Barrett 2007), and more distinct phonetic categories (Malsheen 1980;Masataka 1992;Andruski and Kuhl 1996;Kuhl et al 1997;Burnham et al 2002;Liu et al 2007;Cristià 2010) when compared to ADS. In the literature, these characteristics of IDS have been argued to play important roles in communication between infants and caregivers, such as capturing the infants' attention, communicating affect, and facilitating the infants' language development (e.g., Fernald 1989;Kitamura et al 2002). The prosodic and segmental characteristics of IDS can, therefore, provide us with an ideal window through which the dynamical aspects of phonology can be investigated.…”

“…Specifically, caregivers are reported to use 'exaggerated' or 'sing-songy' intonation in IDS across many languages, and this intonation is often argued to be one of the universal properties of IDS (Ferguson 1977;Grieser and Kuhl 1988;Fernald et al 1989;Kitamura et al 2002). Interestingly, however, significant cross-linguistic differences are also known to exist in the characteristics of IDS (Bernstein Ratner and Pye 1984;Grieser and Kuhl 1988;Fernald et al 1989;Papoušek et al 1991;Kitamura et al 2002). Fernald et al (1989) compared intonational modifications in six languages/varieties (French, Italian, German, British English, American English, and Japanese), and found that all of them except Japanese showed pitch-range expansion in IDS.…”

“…Ladd 1996: Ch. 7), using the F 0 range of the overall utterance as the measurement (e.g., Ferguson 1977;Grieser and Kuhl 1988;Fernald et al 1989;Papoušek et al 1991;Kitamura et al 2002). If, however, the mechanism of register-induced modification of intonation is constrained by language-specificity in intonational phonology (Ladd 1996: 334;Gussenhoven 2004: 355;Jun 2005: 462), the conventional measurements may not have been sufficient to capture the nature of intonational exaggeration for each language.…”