Journal
COGNITION
Volume 163, Issue -, Pages 80-86Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.02.017
Keywords
Infant-directed communication; Speech and song; Temporal variability; Hierarchical nested clustering; Language development
Categories
Funding
- AIRS, a MCRI-SSHRC Canada
- European Union [327586]
- University of Montpellier
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Caregivers alter the temporal structure of their utterances when talking and singing to infants compared with adult communication. The present study tested whether temporal variability in infant-directed registers serves to emphasize the hierarchical temporal structure of speech. Fifteen German-speaking mothers sang a play song and told a story to their 6-months-old infants, or to an adult. Recordings were analyzed using a recently developed method that determines the degree of nested clustering of temporal events in speech. Events were defined as peaks in the amplitude envelope, and clusters of various sizes related to periods of acoustic speech energy at varying timescales. Infant-directed speech and song clearly showed greater event clustering compared with adult-directed registers, at multiple timescales of hundreds of milliseconds to tens of seconds. We discuss the relation of this newly discovered acoustic property to temporal variability in linguistic units and its potential implications for parent-infant communication and infants learning the hierarchical structures of speech and language. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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