Utterances in infant-directed speech are shorter, not slower

Martin, Andrés; Igarashi, Yōsuke; Jincho, Nobuyuki; Mazuka, Reiko

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.07.015

Cited by 74 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Older interlocutors across cultures display a distinct infant‐directed speech register, no matter if they are female, male, parent, sibling, or a stranger. Their utterances are shorter and higher pitched, and they contain distinct melodic contours and more repetition . These salient alterations in speech, as well as songs, chants, and rhythmic vocal play contribute to an overall highly rhythmic character of infant‐directed communication.…”

Section: Human and Nonhuman Studies Of Vocal Rhythmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Higher repetitiveness, greater metrical stability, shorter utterances, and enhanced utterance‐final lengthening in infant‐directed speech are all temporal cues, which could help infants to generate temporal predictions about upcoming linguistic structure . In infant‐directed speech, temporal cues particularly emphasize phrase boundary information through enhanced preboundary lengthening and longer postboundary pauses . These cues provided by adults help infants to direct their attention to phrase edges.…”

Section: Human and Nonhuman Studies Of Vocal Rhythmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their utterances are shorter and higher pitched, and they contain distinct melodic contours and more repetition. [123][124][125] These salient alterations in speech, as well as songs, chants, and rhythmic vocal play 126,127 contribute to an overall highly rhythmic character of infant-directed communication. According to evolutionary hypotheses, rhythmic traits of adult-infant interaction are an ancestral part of human child-rearing practice, whose primary goal was to foster infants' and mothers' capacity to affiliate and align with each other and to develop mutual understanding and experience sharing beyond symbolic communication.…”

Section: Babbling and Stutteringmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In infant-directed speech, temporal cues particularly emphasize phrase boundary information through enhanced preboundary lengthening and longer postboundary pauses. 124,139 These cues provided by adults help infants to direct their attention to phrase edges. Indeed, infants at 8 months of age more easily segment words at phrase-final versus medial positions in speech.…”

Section: Babbling and Stutteringmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

Ravignani

Bella

Falk

et al. 2019

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Why does human speech have rhythm? As we cannot travel back in time to witness how speech developed its rhythmic properties and why humans have the cognitive skills to process them, we rely on alternative methods to find out. One powerful tool is the comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other species to determine which traits are shared between species and which are recent human inventions. Vocalizations of many species exhibit temporal structure, but little is known about how these rhythmic structures evolved, are perceived and produced, their biological and developmental bases, and communicative functions. We review the literature on rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations as a first step toward understanding similarities and differences across species. We extend this review to quantitative techniques that are useful for computing rhythmic structure in acoustic sequences and hence facilitate cross‐species research. We report links between vocal perception and motor coordination and the differentiation of rhythm based on hierarchical temporal structure. While still far from a complete cross‐species perspective of speech rhythm, our review puts some pieces of the puzzle together.

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Section: Human and Nonhuman Studies Of Vocal Rhythmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Human and Nonhuman Studies Of Vocal Rhythmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Babbling and Stutteringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Babbling and Stutteringmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

Ravignani

Bella

Falk

et al. 2019

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…2 Phonological structures found in IDV are, in fact, more similar to phonological patterns produced by Japanese infants earlier in development than to patterns found in the adult lexicon (Tsuji, Nishikawa, & Mazuka, 2014; a list of 50 earlier produced words is given by Iba, 2000). In addition to pattern repetition within words, IDS also presents more content word repetition, as well as more frequent and longer pauses, making utterances in IDS shorter than in ADS (Martin, Igarashi, Jincho, & Mazuka, 2016).…”

Section: Japanese Idsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Words Easier to Learn From Infant‐ Than Adult‐Directed Speech? A Quantitative Corpus‐Based Investigation

et al. 2018

Self Cite

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We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: The IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.

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