Factors Influencing Infant Perception of Infant-directed Speech

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It has long been documented that we speak to infants and young children in a special way. This is often called “babytalk”, but researchers refer to it as infant-directed speech (IDS). Several decades of research suggest that many of the characteristics of IDS are helpful for infants in learning language, most notably by drawing their attention to language infants prefer to listen to IDS over adult-directed speech (ADS). However, much of the research on IDS has relied on infants learning North American English, and IDS in North American English is known to be a particularly extreme form of IDS compared with other languages. In addition, the research has produced very mixed results about how infant preference for IDS changes over development.******My research in the long term focuses on the relationship between infants' developing perceptual system and the environment. In service of this goal, my current program of research examines the characteristics of IDS and infants' preference for IDS across a series of experimental studies. The first examines how caregivers' speech to infants varies as a function of different tasks (soothing, playing, labeling objects), and the infant's age. The second examines infant's preference for these different kinds of IDS depending on a) the task in which the IDS was produced, b) the age of the infant being spoken to when the speech was recorded and c) the age of the infant being tested. The third examines North American infants' and adults' responses to IDS produced in other languages to what extend is IDS detectable across languages, and do infants prefer IDS produced in other languages the same way they prefer North American English IDS? The fourth will test infants' preference for IDS where the speech has been artificially manipulated to vary acoustic and structural properties of the speech.******This series of experimental will provide an important window into the role that IDS plays in drawing infants' attention to speech across development and across different contexts. It will also provide key findings regarding the extent to which the use of IDS, and infant preference for IDS, are universal properties of human language, and the extent to which IDS varies across languages. Because health care professionals sometimes encourage or discourage the use of IDS by caregivers, these findings will have implications not only for our basic understanding of infants' developing perceptual and linguistic systems, but will be beneficial for informing health care policy.******My work also provides a substantive opportunity to engage with research for trainees at all levels, including undergraduate research assistants, honours students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Students from my laboratory emerge with an understanding of state-of-the-art open science approaches, prepared to follow academic and research-based positions, or pursue training in more applied settings with a grounding in basic scientific discovery.**