LING/COGS Colloquium: How should we sound when we talk to babies? Rethinking what we know about the phonetics and phonology of infant directed speech

Abstract

In contemporary research on language development, 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. Here, I review research that questions this normative perspective to the phonetics and phonology of infant-directed speech, or IDS: Does everyone speak to babies using higher pitch, slower speech rates, and more variable articulation, etc. … and if not, should they? I will then present work taht examines these issues in two ways. 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 parent talk. Second, I report a cross-cultural comparison of IDS from Canadian and ni-Vanuatu mothers. Results, with prior work, suggest serious problems for normative approaches to IDS phonetics.