The Importance Of Infant Directed Speech

From the moment an infant is born, it is bombarded with sounds that the brain attempts to categorize. Within the first year of life alone, infants already show preferences for phonologically legal structures in their native language when compared to illegal consonant structures (Friederici et al., 1993). While a personal lexicon is not developed until later in childhood, the early stages, primarily the recognition of word segmentation, begins within the first year of life. The topic of what the important factors are in babies perceiving speech and building a preference to their own language, however, is shrouded in mystery. For instance, Friedrici et al.’s study on phonotactic knowledge of word boundaries gave results that indicate the combination of simple context cues as well as the use of infant directed speech (IDS) allows babies to recognize phonotactically legal structures by nine months. However, McMurray et al.’s results directly contrast those findings by arguing that IDS simply causes a slower rate of speech but does not highlight contrasts between segmented sounds, nor does it enhance phonetic cues. Infant directed speech is a “speech register characterized by simpler sentences, a slower rate, and more variable prosody” (McMurray et al., 2012). While there is controversy regarding the beneficial factors of infant directed speech, most studies indicate that this register is extremely beneficial for infant speech perception in the first year of life.

In Cooper et al.’s study on newborn and one-month-old infants, he investigated infant preference for IDS as opposed to adult directed speech (ADS). The experimenters tested this by placing an infant in between two identical checkerboards. When the infant looked in one direc...

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...o they had just seen and the other was a novel face. The people in the videos were each Caucasian women and each actress did a video speaking in IDS register and in ADS register. Each infant heard only one of the two registers and it was randomly selected which actress and which voice register was used in the video. Results indicated that infants looked longer at the face, showing familiarity and preference, of the woman in the video after she spoke to them using IDS. However, infants actually showed a preference for the novel face when compared with the face of the woman who spoke in an ADS register. These results once again showcase how important infant directed speech is to directing infant attention and therefore enhance learning. This also shows that IDS has a social aspect that allows infants to feel they want to recognize IDS speakers more than ADS speakers.