03 Dec 2002

Simone Ashby

It has been suggested that infant-directed speech (IDS) may serve as a set of early language instructions, and that prosodic bootstrapping -- in the form of exaggerated pitch contours, heightened pitch range, melodic repetitiveness, et al. -- may enable the infant to begin to segment the speech stream, thereby gradually acquiring and making sense of discrete lexical items.

Assuming prosodic bootstrapping is a real phenomenon and prosodic modification in IDS facilitates an initial segmentation of the continuous audio stream, those prosodic cues which identify particularly IDS-like speech should also flag parts of the stream to which the infant should pay particular attention.

The question is how then do we go about characterising IDS in order to accurately investigate those prosodic cues? Can such properties be quantified? Or is quantification confounded by other important variables, such as voice quality and affective intent? Further, how might we distinguish IDS from different varieties of hyperarticulated speech, whereby the speaker is similarly constrained by output-orientated goals for effective communication?

The aims of this research are twofold: (1) to reassess the prosodic identity of English IDS both quantitatively, and with regard to other carefully articulated speech forms; and (2) to contribute to the understanding of hyperarticulated speech by comparing IDS, where it is assumed the addressee has scant familiarity with the ambient language, against a backdrop of other uniquely motivated hyperarticulated speech registers, including speech to foreigners, speech across a noisy communication channel, and human-machine interaction.

Research background and preliminary findings will be presented.

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