infant-directed child speech

[Nan Ratner]

If I read the query correctly, it is asking about speech to INFANTS as
opposed to somewhat older children. For this, my own database in CHILDES
(Bernstein corpus) may be useful (and has accompanying audio); it has
samples from women addressing preverbal infants as well as children
beginning to use language (in some cases, the same mothers over time).
There are a number of differences, as noted in some of my work done in
the 80's, including acoustic clarity of the signal; others have noted
other distributional differences. Some of this work appeared in the
volume From Signal to Syntax edited by Morgan & Demuth. You will
probably need to search the literature back a few years - this question
was more popular in the 80's than it has seemed to be recently. At that
time, a number of studies, it seems to be, did contrast aspects of
child-directed speech with speech to infants.

Nan

Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ed.D.
Chairman
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

301-405-4217
301-314-2023 (FAX)

nratner at hesp.umd.edu


>>> Brian MacWhinney <macw at mac.com> 6/15/2005 1:22:04 PM >>>
Yes, John,  this is a good point.  Gordon Wells had some statistics
computed already in his 1981 (?) book on the overall nature of the
amount of input per day.  However, a downside of the Wells corpus is
that we don't have the original audio.  I wonder if it still exists.

I am copying this to Gordon Wells, just on the chance it might.

I am not clear that Margaret is asking about temporal distribution
patterns as much as the nature of the differences.  For that, the
Brent-Siskind corpus would also be excellent and it has linked audio.

--Brian MacWhinney

On Jun 15, 2005, at 12:59 PM, John Limber wrote:

> As someone suggested in response to another question recently, the
> Wells
> data set in CHILDES, with systematic radio sampling of a large
> sample of
> children over time can answer many important questions (within the
> limits of
> those British families included.)
> --
> John Limber
> Durham NH
>
>
>
>
>> From: Margaret Fleck <mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu>
>> Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 11:40:35 -0500
>> To: <info-childes at mail.talkbank.org>
>> Subject: infant-directed child speech
>>
>>
>> What's known about infant-directed child speech, e.g. as potential

>> input to
>> child language learners?   The amount of such speech presumably
>> varies
>> a lot.   However, when it occurs, it seems like it's very different
>> from either motherese or background adult-adult speech.
>>
>>
>> Margaret Fleck
>> (U. Illinois)
>>
>>
>
>
>
>