TY - JOUR
T1 - Infant-directed visual prosody
T2 - Mothers' head movements and speech acoustics
AU - Smith, Nicholas A.
AU - Strader, Heather L.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Colleen Gibilisco for assistance with subject recruitment and data collection. This is research was supported in part by the NIH (T35DC008757; P30DC4662).
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Acoustical changes in the prosody of mothers' speech to infants are distinct and near universal. However, less is known about the visible properties of mothers' infant-directed (ID) speech, and their relation to speech acoustics. Mothers' head movements were tracked as they interacted with their infants using ID speech, and compared to movements accompanying their adult-directed (AD) speech. Movement measures along three dimensions of head translation, and three axes of head rotation were calculated. Overall, more head movement was found for ID than AD speech, suggesting that mothers exaggerate their visual prosody in a manner analogous to the acoustical exaggerations in their speech. Regression analyses examined the relation between changing head position and changing acoustical pitch (F0) over time. Head movements and voice pitch were more strongly related in ID speech than in AD speech. When these relations were examined across time windows of different durations, stronger relations were observed for shorter time windows (< 5 sec). However, the particular form of these more local relations did not extend or generalize to longer time windows. This suggests that the multimodal correspondences in speech prosody are variable in form, and occur within limited time spans.
AB - Acoustical changes in the prosody of mothers' speech to infants are distinct and near universal. However, less is known about the visible properties of mothers' infant-directed (ID) speech, and their relation to speech acoustics. Mothers' head movements were tracked as they interacted with their infants using ID speech, and compared to movements accompanying their adult-directed (AD) speech. Movement measures along three dimensions of head translation, and three axes of head rotation were calculated. Overall, more head movement was found for ID than AD speech, suggesting that mothers exaggerate their visual prosody in a manner analogous to the acoustical exaggerations in their speech. Regression analyses examined the relation between changing head position and changing acoustical pitch (F0) over time. Head movements and voice pitch were more strongly related in ID speech than in AD speech. When these relations were examined across time windows of different durations, stronger relations were observed for shorter time windows (< 5 sec). However, the particular form of these more local relations did not extend or generalize to longer time windows. This suggests that the multimodal correspondences in speech prosody are variable in form, and occur within limited time spans.
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U2 - 10.1075/is.15.1.02smi
DO - 10.1075/is.15.1.02smi
M3 - Article
C2 - 25242907
AN - SCOPUS:84902253670
SN - 1572-0373
VL - 15
SP - 38
EP - 54
JO - Interaction Studies
JF - Interaction Studies
IS - 1
ER -