Prosodic correlates to meaning in infant-directed speech
Debora S. Herold, Laura L. Namy, Lynne C. Nygaard · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2006
The present investigation examined the extent to which speakers produce reliable prosodic correlates to meaning across a range of semantic domains and whether parents use these kinds of cues to teach word meanings to children. In study 1, acoustic properties including fundamental frequency (F0), F0 variation, duration, and amplitude of infant-directed utterances were examined. Speakers were asked to produce question phrases in which novel words were used to convey one of two meanings from a set of antonym pairs (e.g., big/small, yummy/yucky). Herold (2006) has shown that adult listeners can identify word meanings from the prosodic information contained in these utterances. Acoustic analyses revealed that each word meaning had a unique acoustic signature, and that related word meanings such as big and tall and small and short had similar acoustic profiles. Study 2 explored whether naturalistic parental speech to young children recruits similar acoustic properties in the service of providing prosodic cues to meaning. Results demonstrated that mothers systematically varied prosodic cues as a function of word meaning when producing speech to their children. These findings suggest that speech directed to infants contains reliable prosodic markers to word meaning and that mothers may use prosodic cues to differentiate word meanings in word learning contexts.