Fathers' use of fundamental frequency in motherese

Abstract

Studies of motherese or child-directed speech (CDS) have paid scant attention to fathers' speech when talking to children. This study compares mothers' and fathers' use of CDS in terms of fundamental frequency (F0) production, examining natural speech from a very large database of hundreds of hours of family speech including mothers, fathers, and preschool children. The day-long recordings are collected with specialized recording software and body-worn hardware, then analyzed with automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology (LENA Research Foundation, Boulder, CO). CDS is defined here as speech in a conversational exchange between the parent and child, and adult-directed speech (ADS) is speech between adults or speech in which the child is not a (vocal) participant. Results confirm many reports in the literature of mothers' increased F0 during CDS. Results fail to show a difference in the F0 characteristics between fathers' CDS and ADS speech. This shows that children's linguistic experience with fathers is different than with mothers. This result could be useful to improve ASR techniques and better understand the role of usage in natural language acquisition and the role fathers play in the language acquisition process.