In earlier work, we have shown that articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech (CDS) increases as a function of the age of the child, even when utterance length and differences in articulation rate between subjects are controlled for. In this paper we show on utterance level in spontaneous Swedish speech that i) for the youngest children, articulation rate in CDS is lower than in adult-...

In earlier work, we have shown that articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech (CDS) increases as a function of the age of the child, even when utterance length and differences in articulation rate between subjects are controlled for. In this paper we show on utterance level in spontaneous Swedish speech that i) for the youngest children, articulation rate in CDS is lower than in adult-...

Interval-based rhythm metrics were applied to the speech of English, Catalan and Spanish female adults addressing their children (aged 2, 4 and 6 years) and compared with their speech when addressing adults. Results reveal that when mothers speak to their children, their speech is more vocalic and more even-timed than when they address other adults. However, cross-linguistic differences are sti...

ABSTRACTAcoustic-phonetic exaggeration of infant-directed speech (IDS) is well documented, but few studies address whether these features are modified with a child's age. Mandarin-speaking mothers were recorded while addressing an adult and their child at two ages (0 ; 7-1 ; 0 and 5 ; 0) to examine the acoustic-phonetic differences between IDS and child-directed speech (CDS). CDS exhibits an ex...

In order to acquire their native languages, children must learn richly structured systems with regularities at multiple levels. While structure at different levels could be learned serially, e.g., speech segmentation coming before word-object mapping, redundancies across levels make parallel learning more efficient. For instance, a series of syllables is likely to be a word not only because of ...

We present a corpus of child and child-directed speech of European Portuguese. This corpus results from the expansion of an already existing database (Santos, 2006). It includes around 52 hours of child-adult interaction and now contains 27,595 child utterances and 70,736 adult utterances. The corpus was transcribed according to the CHILDES system (Child Language Data Exchange System) and using...

Research on the facial expression of emotion distinguishes between correlates of posed vs. spontaneous emotion expression. Similar research in the vocal domain is lacking. In this study, we compare changes in a range of vocal parameters between posed vs. spontaneous adult-directed (AD) and child–directed (CD) speech. CDS is a highly affectively charged speech register which lends itself well to...

It has been shown that articulation rate (AR), the number of produced linguistic units per time unit with pauses excluded, is lower in child-directed speech (CDS) than in adult-directed speech (ADS). The present study is the first corpus-based longitudinal study to investigate AR in Swedish CDS as a function of child age while also controlling for utterance length in terms of number of syllable...