Infant-directed speech facilitates lexical learning in adults hearing Chinese: Implications for language acquisition

Author(s): Alioto, A.

Journal/Book: J Child Lang. 1995; 22: 40 West 20TH Street, New York, NY 10011-4211. Cambridge Univ Press. 703-726.

Abstract: Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effects of infant-directed (ID) speech on adults' ability to learn an individual target word in sentences in an unfamiliar, non-Western language (Chinese). English-speaking adults heard pairs of sentences read by a female, native Chinese speaker in either ID or adult-directed (AD) speech. The pairs of sentences described slides of Io common objects. The Chinese name for the object (the target word) was placed in an utterance-final position in experiment 1 (n = 61) and in a medial position in experiment 2 (n = 79) At test, each Chinese target word was presented in isolation in AD speech in a recognition task. Only subjects who heard ID speech with the target word in utterance-final position demonstrated learning of the target words. The results support assertions that ID speech, which tends to put target words in sentence-final position, may assist infants in segmenting and remembering portions of the linguistic stream. In experiment 3 (n = 23), subjects judged whether each of the ID and AD speech samples prepared for experiments 1 and 2 were directed to an adult or to an infant. Judgements were above chance for two types of sentence: ID speech with the target word in the final position and AD speech with the target word in a medial position. In addition to indirectly confirming the results of experiments 1 and 2, these findings suggest that at least some of the prosodic features which comprise ID speech in Chinese and English must overlap.

Note: Article RM Golinkoff, Univ Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 USA

Keyword(s): MATERNAL SPEECH; 4-MONTH-OLD INFANTS; TRADING RELATIONS; MOTHERS SPEECH; YOUNG INFANTS; PREFERENCE; PERCEPTION; MARKING; FOCUS; UNITS

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