Search research articles

ABOUT JoVE

Overview Leadership Blog JoVE Help Center

AUTHORS

Publishing Process Editorial Board Scope & Policies Peer Review FAQ Submit

LIBRARIANS

Testimonials Subscriptions Access Resources Library Advisory Board FAQ

RESEARCH

JoVE Journal Methods Collections JoVE Encyclopedia of Experiments Archive

EDUCATION

JoVE Core JoVE Business JoVE Science Education JoVE Lab Manual Faculty Resource Center Faculty Site

Terms & Conditions of Use

Related Concept Videos

Language Development

Language Development

Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by

Same author

Hemodynamic Responses to Word Forms in Japanese Infant-Directed Vocabulary in 5- and 9-Month-Old Infants: Early Sensitivity to Prosodic Structure and Emergence of Prosodic Representations.

Developmental science·2026

Same author

Unique Challenges Faced by Global Developmental Scientists During Peer-Review: A Survey Study.

Developmental science·2026

Same author

Simulating Early Phonetic and Word Learning Without Linguistic Categories.

Developmental science·2025

Same author

Early influence of language experience in non-native speech perception: Discrimination of three-way Thai stop contrasts by Korean and Japanese infants.

Infant behavior & development·2024

Same author

Ethical and epistemic costs of a lack of geographical and cultural diversity in developmental science.

Developmental psychology·2024

Same author

Modeling early phonetic acquisition from child-centered audio data.

Cognition·2024

Same journal

Pronoun Resolution in Turkish: The Interplay of Referential Form, Word Order, and Implicit Causality.

Cognitive science·2026

Same journal

What's in a Color?: Language, Synesthesia, and Categorical Perception.

Cognitive science·2026

Same journal

Reasoning Beyond Explicit Rules: Adults' and Children's Use of Closure Principles in Novel Cases.

Cognitive science·2026

Same journal

Intermediary Object States Are Activated by Sentences Describing Completed Events.

Cognitive science·2026

Same journal

Large Language Models Estimate Fine-Grained Human Color-Concept Associations.

Cognitive science·2026

Same journal

Computational Models of Causal Reasoning: Bayesian Accounts of Normative Violations.

Cognitive science·2026

See all related articles

Search research articles

Related Experiment Video

Updated: Nov 4, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Does Infant-Directed Speech Help Phonetic Learning? A Machine Learning Investigation.

Bogdan Ludusan^1,2, Reiko Mazuka^1,3, Emmanuel Dupoux⁴

¹Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Center for Brain Science.

Cognitive Science

|May 21, 2021

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Infant-directed speech (IDS) may not help babies learn phonetic categories as much as previously thought. This study found IDS did not create more separable or robust vowel categories compared to adult-directed speech (ADS).

Keywords:

Adult-directed speech Hyperarticulation Infant-directed speech Phonetic learning Read speech Speech variability

More Related Videos

Measuring Statistical Learning Across Modalities and Domains in School-Aged Children Via an Online Platform and Neuroimaging Techniques

Measuring Statistical Learning Across Modalities and Domains in School-Aged Children Via an Online Platform and Neuroimaging Techniques

Published on: June 30, 2020

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Nov 4, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Measuring Statistical Learning Across Modalities and Domains in School-Aged Children Via an Online Platform and Neuroimaging Techniques

Measuring Statistical Learning Across Modalities and Domains in School-Aged Children Via an Online Platform and Neuroimaging Techniques

Published on: June 30, 2020

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Area of Science:

Linguistics
Developmental Psychology
Speech Science

Background:

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is hypothesized to aid phonetic category learning in infants.
Key features of IDS, such as hyperarticulation and variability, are believed to enhance category separability and robustness.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether IDS enhances the separability and robustness of vowel categories compared to adult-directed speech (ADS).
To test the claims that hyperarticulation and variability in IDS facilitate phonetic learning.

Main Methods:

Acoustic analysis of Japanese vowels produced in ADS, IDS (for 18-24 month olds), and read speech (RS).
Vowel category separability was measured using a distance metric.
Vowel category robustness was assessed using six machine learning algorithms for generalization on novel speakers in ADS.

Main Results:

Read speech (RS) exhibited better vowel category separability due to hyperarticulation.
Adult-directed speech (ADS) with higher between-speaker variability led to more robust categories for some machine learning algorithms.
Infant-directed speech (IDS) did not yield significantly more separable or robust vowel categories compared to ADS.

Conclusions:

The findings challenge the prominent hypothesis that IDS inherently aids phonetic category learning through hyperarticulation and variability.
Machine learning algorithms applied to real speech data offer a valuable tool for testing hypotheses about the functional role of IDS in language acquisition.