Contextual influences on infants' attention to child-directed speech

Abstract

Initial publications of infants' preference for infant (child)-directed speech (CDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS) produced a swift generalization to all early development. In fact, a recent meta-analysis found that the CDS preference to be robust (Dunst et al., 2012) and the ManyBabies I replication effort extends this view across labs, methods, and samples (Frank et al., 2018). Nonetheless, there are important demonstrations of how this preference gets attenuated and augmented by various factors. For example, Cooper et al. (1997) found that 1-mo-olds did not prefer CDS over ADS when both recordings were of the infants' own mothers, but did prefer CDS when the speakers were unfamiliar women. Other studies on CDS perception find influences of the language being spoken, the modality of presentation, the age of the infant, the clinical status of the mother and/or of the infant. The influence of context on infants' attention to speech is an underappreciated and understudied aspect of early language learning. This presentation will summarize contextual moderators of the CDS preference that emanate from the infant and from the infant's developmental milieu, and offer suggestions for other contexts that most likely impact infants' attention to CDS but have yet to be investigated (e.g., poverty).