丁香园AV

Congratulations to Dr. Henny Yueng, who presented his inaugral talk on September 29th with the title: "How should we sound when we talk to babies?"

Abstract:

In contemporary research on language development, there is a renewed focus on what babies (should) hear. For example, public initiatives, like the 鈥�30-million word gap鈥� or 鈥淧rovidence Talks,鈥� apply normative standards to the quantity of richness of parent talk, while other research trends identify socio-pragmatic features of 鈥榟igh-quality鈥� parent talk. Here, I review research that questions this normative perspective to the phonetics and phonology of infant-directed speech, or IDS: Does everyone speak to babies using higher pitch, slower speech rates, and more variable articulation, etc. ... and if not, should they? I will then present work that examines these issues in two ways. First, I report an analysis of IDS phonetics from a large corpus of urbanized North American caregivers, asking whether the enhancement of prosodic features is correlated with other 鈥榩ositive鈥� estimates of parent talk. Second, I report a cross-cultural comparison of IDS from Canadian and ni-Vanuatu mothers. Results, with prior work, suggest serious problems for normative approaches to IDS phonetics.

The talk was recorded and can be watched at the following link: