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ERIC Number: EJ1485831
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Sep
Pages: 20
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: EISSN-1469-7602
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Acoustic Cues to Phrase and Clause Boundaries in Infant-Directed Speech: Evidence from LENA Recordings
Tianlin Wang1; Elie ChingYen Yu1; Rong Huang1,2; Jill Lany3
Journal of Child Language, v51 n5 p1193-1212 2024
Infant-directed speech (IDS) produced in laboratory settings contains acoustic cues, such as pauses, pitch changes, and vowel-lengthening that could facilitate breaking speech into smaller units, such as syntactically well-formed utterances, and the noun- and verb-phrases within them. It is unclear whether these cues are present in speech produced in more natural contexts outside the lab. We captured LENA recordings of caregiver speech to 12-month-old infants in daylong interactions (N = 49) to address this question. We found that the final positions of syntactically well-formed utterances contained greater vowel lengthening and pitch changes, and were followed by longer pauses, relative to non-final positions. However, we found no evidence that these cues were present at utterance-internal phrase boundaries. Results suggest that acoustic cues marking the boundaries of well-formed utterances are salient in everyday speech to infants and highlight the importance of characterizing IDS in a large sample of naturally-produced speech to infants.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1University at Albany, State University of New York, USA; 2University of Connecticut, USA; 3University of Liverpool, UK