title: Mothers speak less clearly to infants than to adults: a comprehensive test of the hyperarticulation hypothesis.
abstract: Infants learn language at an incredible speed, and one of the first steps in this voyage is learning the basic sound units of their native languages. It is widely thought that caregivers facilitate this task by hyperarticulating when speaking to their infants. Using state-of-the-art speech technology, we addressed this key theoretical question: Are sound categories clearer in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech? A comprehensive examination of sound contrasts in a large corpus of recorded, spontaneous Japanese speech demonstrates that there is a small but significant tendency for contrasts in infant-directed speech to be less clear than those in adult-directed speech. This finding runs contrary to the idea that caregivers actively enhance phonetic categories in infant-directed speech. These results suggest that to be plausible, theories of infants' language acquisition must posit an ability to learn from noisy data.
authors: Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan.
authors: Andrew
authors: A
authors: Martin
authors: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d'Études Cognitives de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique SIERRA Project-Team, Département d'Informatique de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
authors: Thomas
authors: T
authors: Schatz
authors: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d'Études Cognitives de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
authors: Maarten
authors: M
authors: Versteegh
authors: Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan.
authors: Kouki
authors: K
authors: Miyazawa
authors: Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University.
authors: Reiko
authors: R
authors: Mazuka
authors: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d'Études Cognitives de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
authors: Emmanuel
authors: E
authors: Dupoux
authors: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d'Études Cognitives de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique alecristia@gmail.com.
authors: Alejandrina
authors: A
authors: Cristia
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007564:Japan; D007804:Language Development; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009035:Mothers; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception
keywords: hyperarticulation; infant-directed speech; language development; psycholinguistics; speech perception