Main content

Home

Menu

Loading wiki pages...

View
Wiki Version:
Human neurocognitive mechanisms track the acoustic temporal landmarks of the speech signal to enable comprehension. It is also well-known that adults adapt their speech when addressing children to facilitate comprehension. However, the temporal statistics of child-directed speech (CDS) have not been directly contrasted with those of adult-directed speech (ADS) to specify to what extent they can be exploited by the emergent phonological systems of children. In the present study, we analyzed the temporal regularities of spontaneous and read speech productions of 18 Spanish-speaking women addressing adults (ADS) and their children (CDS). We focused on three related metrics of the temporal organization of speech: prosodic and syllabic salience (through the modulation spectrum), regularity of stressed syllables (in terms of delta-theta amplitude modulation phase synchronization), and syllable rate (syllables per second). We found that, while CDS and ADS overlap to a big extent in their modulation spectra and both show syllabic salience, CDS is characterized by a higher regularity of stressed syllables and a slower syllable rate than ADS. These temporal regularities of CDS make it highly supportive to the phonological development of children. Together with previous IDS and ADS findings, our CDS results help to delineate developmental changes in the temporal acoustic speech statistics that human neurocognitive systems need to map for efficient language comprehension across the lifespan.
OSF does not support the use of Internet Explorer. For optimal performance, please switch to another browser.
Accept
This website relies on cookies to help provide a better user experience. By clicking Accept or continuing to use the site, you agree. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and information on cookie use.
Accept
×

Start managing your projects on the OSF today.

Free and easy to use, the Open Science Framework supports the entire research lifecycle: planning, execution, reporting, archiving, and discovery.