Pitch characteristics of real-world infant-directed speech vary with pragmatic context, perceived adult gender, and infant gender.

ABSTRACT: Children's everyday language environments can be full of rich and diverse input, especially adult speech. Prosodic modifications when adults speak to infants are observed cross-culturally and are believed to enhance infant learning and emotion. However, factors such as what and why adults are speaking as well as speaker gender can affect the prosody of adults' speech. This study asks whether prosodic modifications to infant-directed speech depend on perceived adult speaker gender, assigned infant gender, and the perceived pragmatic function of an utterance. We examined 3,607 adult speech clips from daylong home audio recordings of 60 North American, English-speaking, 3- to 20-month-old infants (28 female). Adult speakers used significantly more imperatives and questions and sang more frequ

SUBMITTER: Neer EM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12192138 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature