Es una Vaca or a Cow? Infant-Directed Speech With Spanish-English Bilingual Parents

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

The goal of this research is to understand how bilingual parents adjust their speech when talking to infants. Infant-directed speech (IDS) characteristics include higher pitch, wider pitch range, and longer word durations in comparison to adult-directed speech (ADS). However, most IDS research has examined monolingual samples. There is limited understanding of how bilingual populations produce IDS. We are investigating acoustic characteristics of IDS and ADS with Spanish-English bilingual parents and their infants (8-20 months of age). Forty parent-infant dyads participated in two naturalistic play tasks (6 minutes each) that incorporated a set of 10 consistent objects (e.g., a toy dog, lion, train). For bilingual dyads (n= 20), each object had labels written in Spanish and English (e.g., gato/cat, carro/car, pajaro/bird) and for monolingual dyads, labels were only written in English. Parents also spoke with a bilingual researcher about the same objects to collect samples of ADS speech. We collected audio- and video-recordings of the interactions in IDS and ADS. Using Praat, we extracted the fundamental frequency (f0), a measure of pitch, for all of the target (labeled) object names. A total of 2835 tokens were collected from the bilinguals (Spanish: 1446 tokens; English: 1389 tokens) and 2105 tokens from the monolinguals. We examined whether bilingual and monolingual parents make similar acoustic adjustments in pitch when producing IDS versus ADS. First, for bilinguals, we performed a within-subjects ANOVA of language (English vs. Spanish) and register (IDS vs. ADS) of pitch to test whether the difference in IDS versus ADS differed across languages. There was an overall effect of register; IDS had higher pitch than ADS (p < .001), but no interaction of language (English mean f0 = 23 Hz; Spanish mean f0 =22 Hz). Collapsing across Spanish and English, we then performed an ANOVA examining language groups (Monolingual vs. Bilingual) and register (IDS vs. ADS) to test whether bilinguals and monolinguals differed in pitch patterns. Across groups, IDS was higher than ADS and bilingual pitch was higher than monolingual pitch overall (both p < .001). However, there was no interaction with language groups (see Table 1). Ongoing analyses are examining moment to moment changes in pitch within each register (IDS vs. ADS) to see if bilingual parents adjust pitch across repetitions of target object words in each language. We will also examine individual differences, testing whether infant’s age is related to pitch in IDS.

Authors

• Andrea Ramirez Barajas, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Katharine M. Graf Estes, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author