title: The acoustic properties of bilingual infant-directed speech.
abstract: Does the acoustic input for bilingual infants equal the conjunction of the input heard by monolinguals of each separate language? The present letter tackles this question, focusing on maternal speech addressed to 11-month-old infants, on the cusp of perceptual attunement. The acoustic characteristics of the point vowels /a,i,u/ were measured in the spontaneous infant-directed speech of French-English bilingual mothers, as well as in the speech of French and English monolingual mothers. Bilingual caregivers produced their two languages with acoustic prosodic separation equal to that of the monolinguals, while also conveying distinct spectral characteristics of the point vowels in their two languages.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada kdanielson@psych.ubc.ca.
authors.forename: D Kyle
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Danielson
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, Heavilon Hall, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907 aseidl@purdue.edu.
authors.forename: Amanda
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Seidl
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, McGill University, 1205 avenue du Docteur-Penfield, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1B1, Canada kris.onishi@mcgill.ca, g.alamian@alumni.ubc.ca.
authors.forename: Kristine H
authors.initials: KH
authors.lastname: Onishi
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, McGill University, 1205 avenue du Docteur-Penfield, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1B1, Canada kris.onishi@mcgill.ca, g.alamian@alumni.ubc.ca.
authors.forename: Golnoush
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Alamian
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Pavillon Jardin, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France alecristia@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Alejandrina
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cristia
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009035:Mothers; D019303:Multilingualism; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality