ERIC Number: EJ1403816
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 25
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0009-3920
EISSN: EISSN-1467-8624
Infant-Directed Speech Does Not Always Involve Exaggerated Vowel Distinctions: Evidence from Danish
Cox, Christopher; Dideriksen, Christina; Keren-Portnoy, Tamar; Roepstorff, Andreas; Christiansen, Morten H.; Fusaroli, Riccardo
Child Development, v94 n6 p1672-1696 2023
This study compared the acoustic properties of 26 (100% female, 100% monolingual) Danish caregivers' spontaneous speech addressed to their 11- to 24-month-old infants (infant-directed speech, IDS) and an adult experimenter (adult-directed speech, ADS). The data were collected between 2016 and 2018 in Aarhus, Denmark. Prosodic properties of Danish IDS conformed to cross-linguistic patterns, with a higher pitch, greater pitch variability, and slower articulation rate than ADS. However, an acoustic analysis of vocalic properties revealed that Danish IDS had a reduced or similar vowel space, higher within-vowel variability, raised formants, and lower degree of vowel discriminability compared to ADS. None of the measures, except articulation rate, showed age-related differences. These results push for future research to conduct theory-driven comparisons across languages with distinct phonological systems.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Indo European Languages, Speech Communication, Infants, Language Usage, Suprasegmentals, Articulation (Speech), Acoustics, Vowels
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2191/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Denmark
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Data File: URL: https://osf.io/ywf9m/?view_only=d99fc6dbc61546febff619b8674a7943