Do you speak E-NG-L-I-SH? A comparison of foreigner- and infant-directed speech

Authors:
M. Uther;M. A. Knoll;D. Burnham
Affiliations:
Centre for Cognition and NeuroImaging, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, West London, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK;Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, King Henry Building, King Henry I Street, Portsmouth PO1 2DY, UK;MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Bankstown Campus, University of Western Sydney, Sydney 1797, Australia
Venue:
Speech Communication
Year:
2007

Citing 0
Cited 9

A new method for eliciting three speaking styles in the laboratory

Speech Communication
Effects of low-pass filtering on the judgment of vocal affect in speech directed to infants, adults and foreigners

Speech Communication
Are actresses better simulators than female students? The effects of simulation on prosodic modifications of infant- and foreigner-directed speech

Speech Communication
Robot-directed speech as a means of exploring conceptualizations of robots

Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction
Robot-directed speech: using language to assess first-time users' conceptualizations of a robot

Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction
"Look at the shark": Evaluation of student- and actress-produced standardised sentences of infant- and foreigner-directed speech

Speech Communication
Implicit processing of phonotactic cues: Evidence from electrophysiological and vascular responses

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Evaluating the intelligibility benefit of speech modifications in known noise conditions

Speech Communication
The listening talker: A review of human and algorithmic context-induced modifications of speech

Computer Speech and Language

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Infant-directed speech has three main roles - it attracts attention, conveys emotional affect, and conveys language-specific phonological information, and each of these roles are reflected in certain components of the speech signal - pitch, rated affect, and vowel hyperarticulation. We sought to investigate the independence of these components by comparing British English speech directed to first language English learners (infants), and second language English learners (adult foreigners), populations with similar linguistic but dissimilar affective needs. It was found that, compared with British adult-directed speech, vowels were equivalently hyperarticulated in infant- and foreigner-directed speech. On the other hand, pitch was higher in speech to infants than to foreigners or adult British controls; and positive affect was highest in infant-directed and lowest in foreigner-directed speech. These results suggest that linguistic modifications found in both infant- and foreigner-directed speech are didactically oriented, and that linguistic modifications are independent of vocal pitch and affective valence.