The studies proposed here investigate the universality and developmental functions of the exaggerated intonation patterns characteristic of adult speech to infants. This research is motivated by three central hypotheses: 1) The use of exaggerated intonation in speech to infants is an adaptive human parenting behavior, which serves to modulate infant attention, communicate affect and facilitate language development; 2) These characteristic prosodic patterns in speech to infants will be observed in non-Western as well as European cultures; 3) Certain stereotypical intonation patterns in mothers' speech, common across culture, come to function as the first regular sound-meaning correspondences appreciated by the pre-verbal infant. The first goal of the project is to conduct a series of cross=language field studies of adult speech to infants in Japanese, Italian, Hausa, Spanish, Black American English, Tongan, and Samoan. These observational studies will investigate common patterns as well as language-specific variations in the prosodic modifications used in mothers' speech to infants in these diverse languages and cultures. The second goal is to conduct a series of cross-language experimental studies with adult and infant subjects, to test tow hypotheses within and across languages: 1) When mothers' speech to infants is filtered to remove linguistic content, adult listeners can correctly identify the communicative intent of the speaker based on intonation patterns alone, even in an unfamiliar language; 2) Pre-verbal infants are also selectively responsive to context-specific intonation contours in mothers' speech. This research strategy combines cross-cultural breadth with experiment rigor to yield convergent evidence of both language-independent and language-specific features of parental speech to infants, and on universal processes in the transition from preverbal to verbal communication.
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| Fernald, A; Morikawa, H (1993) Common themes and cultural variations in Japanese and American mothers' speech to infants. Child Dev 64:637-56 |
| Fernald, A (1993) Approval and disapproval: infant responsiveness to vocal affect in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Child Dev 64:657-74 |
