3-193 - The Moment-to-Moment Dynamics of Infant-Directed Speech: What Infants Hear and How They Learn

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

This symposium examines the nature of the language-learning signal that infants and young children hear from their caregivers, and how they capitalize on its structure. While infant-directed speech (IDS) has been studied for decades, characterizing the speech signal remains empirically and theoretically controversial. In this symposium, we will bring together investigators from different fields (Psycholinguistics, Phonetics, Developmental Psychology, and Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences) using a broad range of methodological approaches to understand how infants process and learn from the dynamics of caregiver speech. The first talk demonstrates how an ingrained speech production pattern – reduction in repeated words – is altered to suit immature language users. The second talk examines how variation in prosodic contours in IDS helps infants learn to interpret native-language prosody. The third talk integrates hierarchical cluster analyses of caregivers’ pitch variation with infants’ physiological responses to distinct contours. The fourth talk builds on the interactive nature of IDS to examine the multimodal alignment of parents’ exaggerated pitch productions with the timing of infant touch. Together, the talks provide novel insight into the real-time, subsecond nature of IDS, linking important features of infants’ environments to key mechanisms that enable learning.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Katharine Graf Estes, University of California, Davis

Individual Presentations

• The Scope of Audience Design in Child-Directed-Speech: Parents Tailor Word Length for Adults versus Children - Presenting Author: Nicholas Tippenhauer, Vanderbilt University; Non-Presenting Author: Eva Fourakis, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Duane G. Watson, Vanderbilt University

• Prosodic Variation in Infant-Directed Speech - Presenting Author: Katharine Graf Estes, University of California, Davis; Non-Presenting Author: Georgia Zellou, University of California, Davis

• Real-Time dynamics of Child-Directed Speech: Using Pupillometry to Evaluate Children’s Processing of Natural Pitch Contours - Presenting Author: Mira Nencheva, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Elise Piazza, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University

• Touch Alignment Produces Exaggerated Speech Cues - Presenting Author: Rana Abu-Zhaya, Purdue University; Non-Presenting Author: Amanda Seidl, Purdue University