The Development of Language and Attention in Infancy

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There has been a great deal of research investigating a phenomenon known as "motherese". This refers to the fact that most adults adjust their speech when talking to an infant. Research has shown that infants prefer listening to this type of speech, suggesting that its purpose may be to increase infant attention levels to speech, thus aiding language learning. Another possibility is that these variations in speaking style serve to make speech more unique, and thus easier to separate from background speech. In fact, many of the variations common in motherese are analogous to cues shown to be important in musical streaming. Parents report that they frequently speak to their infants when other speech is occurring in the background, suggesting that there might be a need for such aids to streaming. Although most adults do adjust their speech when speaking to an infant, they vary tremendously in the degree to which this occurs. If these adjustments help infants to separate the speech of simultaneous talkers, then speakers who use more extreme versions of motherese should be easier to separate from adult-directed background speech than are other speakers. We will present 20 adult listeners with the speech recordings used in our infant streaming experiment. They will be asked to rate the extent to which these talkers exemplified motherese speech. These ratings will then be used in a re-analysis of our infant studies, to determine whether those infants who listened to speakers with more exaggerated speech perform better at the streaming task than do those listening to less extreme versions of motherese speech. The results of this study will contribute to the understanding of early language acquisition in children.