Rm. Golinkoff et A. Alioto, INFANT-DIRECTED SPEECH FACILITATES LEXICAL LEARNING IN ADULTS HEARINGCHINESE - IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE-ACQUISITION, Journal of child language, 22(3), 1995, pp. 703-726
Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effects of infant-directed (ID) speec
h on adults' ability to learn an individual target word in sentences i
n an unfamiliar, non-Western language (Chinese). English-speaking adul
ts heard pairs of sentences read by a female, native Chinese speaker i
n either ID or adult-directed (AD) speech. The pairs of sentences desc
ribed slides of Io common objects. The Chinese name for the object (th
e 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 w
ord in utterance-final position demonstrated learning of the target wo
rds. The results support assertions that ID speech, which tends to put
target words in sentence-final position, may assist infants in segmen
ting and remembering portions of the linguistic stream. In experiment
3 (n = 23), subjects judged whether each of the ID and AD speech sampl
es 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 sp
eech with the target word in the final position and AD speech with the
target word in a medial position. In addition to indirectly confirmin
g the results of experiments 1 and 2, these findings suggest that at l
east some of the prosodic features which comprise ID speech in Chinese
and English must overlap.