Are words easier to learn from infant- than adult-directed speech? A quantitative corpus-based investigation
This addresses the problem of understanding language acquisition mechanisms for infants, but the findings are incremental as they challenge the common assumption that IDS inherently improves learnability.
The study investigated whether infant-directed speech (IDS) facilitates word form learning compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) by analyzing acoustic and phonological distributions in Japanese speech data, finding that IDS word forms are globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, with a small numerical effect.
We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: the IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.