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How should we sound when we talk to babies? Rethinking the phonetics and phonology of infant-directed speech| title | How should we sound when we talk to babies? Rethinking the phonetics and phonology of infant-directed speech |
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| start_date | 2023/06/12 |
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| schedule | 11h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Conference room R229 |
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| summary | In language development research, there is a renewed focus on what babies (should) hear. For example, public initiatives, like the “30-million word gap” or “Providence Talks,” apply normative standards to the quantity of richness of parent talk, while other research trends identify socio-pragmatic features of ‘high-quality’ parent talk. There is also a normative perspective to the phonetics and phonology of infant-directed speech (IDS), which argues that we should speak to babies using higher pitch, slower speech rates, and more variable articulation, etc. I will challenge this idea in my talk. First, I report an analysis of IDS phonetics from a large corpus of urbanized North American caregivers, asking whether the enhancement of prosodic features is correlated with other ‘positive’ estimates of the phonetics of parent talk. Results suggest that this correlation does not support a normative approach to IDS phonetics. In the second part of the talk, I suggest instead that IDS as a speech register should be more fully considered in its sociolinguistic context, and I report a cross-cultural comparison of IDS from Canadian and ni-Vanuatu mothers, which again suggests problems for normative approaches to IDS phonetics. Finally, I suggest ways that researchers may begin to think about IDS as a speech register that also interacts with a particular socio-cultural context. |
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| responsibles | Agulhon |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2023/05/26 16:03 UTC |
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