Acoustic cues to phrase and clause boundaries in infant-directed speech: Evidence from LENA recordings.

Abstract

Infant-directed speech (IDS) produced in laboratory settings contains acoustic cues, such as pauses, pitch changes, and vowel-lengthening that could facilitate breaking speech into smaller units, such as syntactically well-formed utterances, and the noun- and verb-phrases within them. It is unclear whether these cues are present in speech produced in more natural contexts outside the lab. We captured LENA recordings of caregiver speech to 12-month-old infants in daylong interactions (N = 49) to address this question. We found that the final positions of syntactically well-formed utterances contained greater vowel lengthening and pitch changes, and were followed by longer pauses, relative to non-final positions. However, we found no evidence that these cues were present at utterance-internal phrase boundaries. Results suggest that acoustic cues marking the boundaries of well-formed utterances are salient in everyday speech to infants and highlight the importance of characterizing IDS in a large sample of naturally-produced speech to infants.