The Relationship Between Infant-Directed Prosody and Indices of Lexical Acquisition at 15 Months of Age

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2002
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
The prosodic features of infant -directed speech are described, and several accounts of potential facilitative effects of such distinct prosodic features for the infant's socioemotional and/or linguistic development are discussed. One of these accounts--that infant-directed prosody facilitates word learning by exaggerating the perceptual salience of novel words in the discourse--is then evaluated through an analysis of two pairs of audio samples taken from the corpora of the Child-Directed Speech Project of the Language Science Research Group based at Washington University at St. Louis. The samples selected were recordings of naturalistic interactions between two mothers and their infants when the infants were nine-and-a-half and 15 months of age. The global prosodic characteristics of the mothers' speech in both the nine-and-a-half- and 15-month samples were assessed and compared to the level of productive language demonstrated by the infants at 15 months, an analysis which yielded no significant effects. In addition, based on previous reports that mothers highlight new and/or semantically focused words in speech to infants by placing such words on utterance-final pitch peaks, the pitch peaks of 40 maternal utterances in each I5-month sample were analyzed to determine how concentrated they were at the ends of utterances and how often they signaled emphatic stress of semantically focused information. Pitch peaks were found to coincide with emphatically stressed words much more often if they occurred utterance-finally than if they occurred elsewhere. The hypothesis that infants would display heightened sensitivity to pitch-peaked and utterance-final words was also evaluated by calculating how many of the infants' words in the 15-month sample had been previously spoken by their mothers in isolation or utterance-final position or on either focally stressed or non-focally stressed pitch peaks. Strong correlations were found to exist with all input variables except for non-focally stressed pitch peaks, although several of the infants' words had not been previously spoken by the mothers at all. These findings are then analyzed with respect to their implications for the relationship between the prosodic characteristics of infantdirected speech and the process of lexical acquisition. Limits on the generalizability of these results and suggestions for future research are also discussed.
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