A multimodal corpus of speech to infant and adult listeners

J Acoust Soc Am. 2013 Dec;134(6):EL534. doi: 10.1121/1.4828977.

Abstract

An audio and video corpus of speech addressed to 28 11-month-olds is described. The corpus allows comparisons between adult speech directed toward infants, familiar adults, and unfamiliar adult addressees as well as of caregivers' word teaching strategies across word classes. Summary data show that infant-directed speech differed more from speech to unfamiliar than familiar adults, that word teaching strategies for nominals versus verbs and adjectives differed, that mothers mostly addressed infants with multi-word utterances, and that infants' vocabulary size was unrelated to speech rate, but correlated positively with predominance of continuous caregiver speech (not of isolated words) in the input.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acoustics
  • Adult
  • Age Factors
  • Caregivers / psychology*
  • Child Development
  • Child Language*
  • Father-Child Relations
  • Female
  • Grandparents / psychology
  • Humans
  • Infant
  • Infant Behavior*
  • Learning
  • Male
  • Mother-Child Relations
  • Recognition, Psychology
  • Speech Acoustics*
  • Speech Perception*
  • Speech Production Measurement
  • Video Recording
  • Vocabulary
  • Voice Quality*