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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

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Prosodic exaggeration within infant-directed speech: Consequences for vowel learnability.

Frans Adriaans¹, Daniel Swingley²

¹Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, the Netherlands.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

|June 11, 2017

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Infants learn native language speech categories by focusing on exaggerated sounds in infant-directed speech. This prosodic exaggeration helps infants identify and learn speech sound categories more easily.

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Area of Science:

Linguistics
Developmental Psychology
Speech Science

Background:

Infants perceptually adapt to native language speech sound categories.
Acoustic analyses suggest phonetic categories aren't clearly separable in infant-directed speech.
The mechanism by which infants learn these categories remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how exaggerated prosody in infant-directed speech aids infants in learning speech sound categories.
To determine if exaggerated prosodic features highlight specific speech sound tokens for easier categorization.

Main Methods:

A database of vowel measurements from natural American English infant-directed speech was created.
Acoustic analyses examined the vowel space and prosodic exaggeration.
Categorization models were trained on both exaggerated and non-exaggerated speech tokens.

Main Results:

Prosodic exaggeration in infant-directed speech can highlight "high-quality" speech sound tokens.
These highlighted tokens potentially facilitate distributional vowel learning.
Models trained on exaggerated tokens performed better than those trained on non-exaggerated tokens.

Conclusions:

Exaggerated prosody in infant-directed speech may simplify the process of speech sound categorization for infants.
Focusing on prominent, exaggerated tokens could make solving the phonetic categorization problem more manageable for infants.