Abstract
Across languages, lexical items specific to infant‐directed speech (i.e., ‘baby‐talk words’) are characterized by a preponderance of onomatopoeia (or highly iconic words), diminutives, and reduplication. These lexical characteristics may help infants discover the referential nature of words, identify word referents, and segment fluent speech into words. If so, the amount of lexical input containing these properties should predict infants’ rate of vocabulary growth. To test this prediction, we tracked the vocabulary size in 47 English‐learning infants from 9 to 21 months and examined whether the patterns of growth can be related to measures of iconicity, diminutives, and reduplication in the lexical input at 9 months. Our analyses showed that both diminutives and reduplication in the input were associated with vocabulary growth, although measures of iconicity were not. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that phonological properties typical of lexical input in infant‐directed speech play a role in early vocabulary growth.
Highlights
The mean length of utterance (MLU) was 4.73 words (SD = 3.47) for mothers and 4.03 words (SD = 3.10) for fathers, values similar to those reported in previous studies (Kavanaugh & Jirkovsky, 1982; Phillips, 1973; Soderstrom, Blossom, Foygel, & Morgan, 2008) and shorter than those in typical adult-directed speech
Unlike most documented differences between infant-directed speech (IDS) and ADS, baby-talk words or the register-specific words in IDS present a unique set of linguistic items that are not part of the core repertoire of adult language use. They exhibit distinct referential and phonological characteristics such as iconicity, diminutives and reduplication, which are untypical of lexical items in ADS
We tested this hypothesis by examining whether the overall change of vocabulary size between 9 and 21 months is related to measures of iconicity, diminutives and reduplication in the lexical input that infants receive
Summary
In many languages and cultures, infant-directed speech (IDS), or the speech to which infants and young children are exposed, systematically differs from adult-directed speech. (ADS) in several respects (see Saint-Georges et al, 2013 and Soderstrom, 2007 for comprehensive reviews of the literature on the characteristics of IDS). It has been shown that at least some of the characteristics found in IDS are facilitative of language development. Infants’ performance is better in IDS than in ADS for tasks measuring categorization of phonetic segments (Trainor & Desjardins, 2002), segmentation of words (Thiessen, Hill, & Saffran, 2005), word–object associations (Ma, Golinkoff, Houston, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2011), and detection of phrasal boundaries (Jusczyk et al, 1992)
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