Are words easier to learn from infant- than adult-directed speech? A quantitative corpus-based investigation

TL;DR

This study compares infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) in Japanese, finding that despite more distinctive words in IDS at the phonological level, acoustic variability makes IDS less discriminable overall for word learning.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative corpus-based analysis showing that IDS's acoustic variability outweighs phonological distinctiveness, affecting word learnability.

Findings

IDS has more variable and less discriminable acoustic realizations.

IDS contains more distinctive words at the phonological level.

Overall, IDS word forms are less discriminable than ADS forms.

Abstract

We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: the IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.