Abstract
The proposed research project investigates how infants learn speech sound categories from the linguistic input they receive: Infant-Directed Speech (IDS). Previous research has shown that speech sounds are best distinguished by a combination of primary, essential cues and secondary, yet informative, cues. However, research on IDS and early language acquisition has largely overlooked the role of these secondary cues. Therefore, our understanding of IDS and its role in language acquisition remains overly simplified. To address this lacuna, the present project aims to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how speech sounds are phonetically contrasted through multiple cues in IDS, whether this facilitates speech sound categorization, and how this affects language acquisition. For this purpose, we will combine large-scale corpus studies of spontaneous speech production with perception experiments. Specifically, we will investigate (1) whether parents exaggerate a single fundamental cue or a combination of cues to help children learn phonological categories through the acoustic analysis of a corpus of parent-infant interactions, (2) we will test in the same corpus whether variations in caregivers' cue-weighting can (partially) explain individual differences in the infants' own cue-weighting in production and (3) we will examine how IDS cue-weighting shapes phoneme categorization, bridging the caregiver input and infant output by means of targeted perception experiments.
Researcher(s)
Research team(s)
Project type(s)