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Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
The ecology of prelinguistic vocal learning: parents simplify the structure of their speech in response to babbling
Steven L Elmlinger1, Jennifer A Schwade1, Michael H Goldstein1
1Department of Psychology, Cornell University, USA.
Abstract:
What is the function of babbling in language learning? We examined the structure of parental speech as a function of contingency on infants' non-cry prelinguistic vocalizations. We analyzed several acoustic and linguistic measures of caregivers' speech. Contingent speech was less lexically diverse and shorter in utterance length than non-contingent speech. We also found that the lexical diversity of contingent parental speech only predicted infant vocal maturity. These findings illustrate a new form of influence infants have over their ambient language in everyday learning environments. By vocalizing, infants catalyze the production of simplified, more easily learnable language from caregivers.
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