An Acoustic Analysis of Child-Directed Speech vs. Spontaneous Speech in Persian-Speaking Men

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assistant Professor at Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

2 Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran

Abstract

The present research aims to investigate child-directed speech vs. spontaneous speech in Persian-speaking men based on Acoustic Phonetics. The method is descriptive-analytical benefiting from qualitative components and quantitative approach (descriptive & inferential statistics using R version 4.1.0). The Data included the recorded speech samples of 10 Persian-speaking men aged 25-45 years for 200 minutes. Five acoustic parameters including F0, F1, F2, F3 and F4 were extracted from the speakers’ speech tokens and measured with PRAAT version 42, 1,6. The results showed that the values of all acoustic parameters, except for F1 changed significantly between the two styles and most of the inter-stylistic variations were observed in parameters of F0 and F2. Furthermore, the acoustic analysis of between-speaker variabilities showed that the changes of the two styles were different. More precisely, F0 and F3 in spontaneous speech and F0 and F1 in child-directed speech had the highest rate of between-speaker variability.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

- ایمانی، آوا و علی نژاد، بتول (1393). »تحلیل آکوستیکی "آهنگ" در قصه گویی کودکان فارسیزبان بر پایه الگوی خیزان، افتان و پیوستگی«. فصلنامه مطالعات زبان و و گویش های غرب ایران، سال دوم، شماره پنجم، صص .61-51 
- مدرسی قوامی، گلناز (1392). آواشناسی: بررسی علمی گفتار، تهران: انتشارات سمت.
-مرادی، نگین؛ باغبان، کوثر؛ سلطانی، مجید؛ جوادی پور، شیوا و صیحه ای، الهام (1393). »بررسی برخی ویژگی های آکوستیک گفتار نوزاد-مدار در مادران فارسیزبان«. مجله علمی-پژوهشی پژوهان، دوره ،12 شماره ،1 صص .27-22
- Andruski, J. E., & Kuhl, P. K. (1997). The acoustic structure of vowels in infant and adult-directed speech. Biannual Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Washington, DC.
- Asadi, H., Nourbakhsh, M, Sasani, F & Dellwo, V. (2018). Examining long-term formant frequency as a forensic cue for speaker identification: An experiment on Persian. In M. Nourbakhsh, H. Asadi, & M. Asiaee (Eds.), Proceedings of the First International Conference on Laboratory Phonetics and Phonology (pp. 21-28). Neveesh Parsi Publications.
- Bernstein Ratner, N. & Luberoff, A. (1984). “Cues to post-vocalic voicing in mother-child speech”. Journal of Phonetics, 12, Pp. 285– 289.
- Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (2013) Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (version 5.2.34). http://www.praat.org, Accessed 13 July 2013.
- Broesch, T., & Bryant, G. A. (2013). “Prosody in infant-directed speech is similar across western and traditional cultures”. Journal of Cognition and Development, 16, Pp. 1–13. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2013.833923.
- Bohn, O. (2013). “Acoustic characteristics of Danish infant directed speech”. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 19. Pp 1-7.
- Burnham, D. K., Kitamura, C. & Vollmer-Conna, U. (2002). “What’s new, Pussycat? On talking to babies and animals”. Science, 296, Pp. 1435.
- Fernald, Anne, et al. (1989). “A cross- language study of prosodic modifications in mothers’ and fathers’ speech to preverbal infants”. Journal of Child Language, 16, Pp. 477– 501.
- Fernald, A. (1992). Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals: An evolutionary perspective. In: Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (eds.), The adapted mind. New York: Oxford University Press, Pp. 391-428.
- Fish, M.S., Garcia-Sierra, Ramirez-Esparza & Kuhl, P.K. (2017). “Infant-directed Speech in English and Spanish: Assessments of monolingual and bilingual caregiver VOT”. Journal of Phonetics. 63, Pp. 19-34.
- Gold, E., French, J.P & Harrison, P (2013). Examining long-term formant distributions as a discriminant in forensic speaker comparisons under a likelihood ratio framework. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Montreal, Canada, (pp. 1-8).
- Ketrez, F. (2014). “Harmonic cues for speech segmentation: A cross-linguistic corpus study on child-directed speech”. Journal of Child Language, 41(2), Pp. 439-461. DOI:10.1017/S0305000912000724.
- McDougall, K. (2004). “Speaker-specific formant analysis: An experiment on Australian English /u:/”. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 11(1), Pp. 103-130.
- McMurray, B., Kristine A. Kovack-Lesh, D. G. & McEchron, W. ( 2013). “Infant directed speech and the development of speech perception: enhancing development or an unintended consequence?”. Cognition, 129, Pp. 362– 378.
- Meshkat, M. & Karami, M. (2016). “Child Directed Speech in SpongeBob SquarePants in its Original English Language and in its Persian-Dubbed Version”. International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education, 8 (1), Pp. 83-99. DOI: 10.20489/intjecse.239577
- Moos, A. (2010). “Long-term formant distribution as a measure of speaker characteristics in read and spontaneous speech”. The Phonetician, 101, Pp. 7-24.
- Pennington, M. (2017). Acoustic-articulatory correlations in a four-region model of the vocal tract: Experimental evidence for blade features, IULC Working Papers.
- Rafatbakhsh, E., Hajiabdorasouli, L., Mehrpour, S. (2017). “Is the language that the mother, the father and the babysitter use to address the child similar regarding sentence types? A case study of a Persian family”. Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development – JCLAD, 5(3), Pp. 145-153.
- Soderstrom, M. (2007). “Beyond babytalk: Re-evaluating the nature and content of speech input to preverbal infants”. Developmental Review 27, Pp. 501– 532.
- Soleimani, H., Rahmanian, M., & Gohar, M. J. (2016). "The Effect of Caretakers’ Frequency and Positional Saliency on Noun Bias in Persian Children: A Study on Child Language Development". BRAIN. Broad Research in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, 7(2), Pp. 59-68.
- Sommers, M. S. & Barcroft, J. (2006). “Stimulus variability and the phonetic relevance hypothesis: Effects of variability in speaking style, fundamental frequency, and speaking rate on spoken word identification”. Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, 119, Pp. 2406-2416.
- Steen, V. B & Englund, N. (2021). “Child-Directed Speech in Norwegian Kindergarten Setting”. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research DOI: 10.1080/00313831.2021.1897873.
- Steinberg, D. & Sciarini, N. (2006). An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. 2nd edition. London: Pearson Longman.
- Sadat-Tehrani, N. (2017). “Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech”. Questions and Answers in Linguistics, 4(1), Pp. 21-43.
- Song, J.Y., Demuth, K., & Morgan, J. (2010). “Effects of the acoustic properties of infant-directed speech on infant word recognition”. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 128(1), Pp. 389-400.
- Sundberg, J. (1977). “The acoustics of the singing voice”. Scientific America, 236(3), Pp. 82–91. DOI:10.1038/scientifificamerican0377-82.
- Takemoto, H., Adachi, S., Kitamura, T., et al. (2006). “Acoustic roles of the laryngeal cavity in vocal tract resonance”. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 120(4), Pp. 2228–2238.
- Trainor, L.J., Desjardins, R.N. (2002). “Pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech affect infants’ ability to discriminate vowels”. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, Pp. 335–340. DOI:/10.3758/BF03196290.
- Wang, Y., Seidle, A., & Cristia, A. (2016). Acoustic Characteristics of Infant directed Speech as a Function of Prosodic Typology. In Heinz, J., Goedmans, R. & Van, D. H. H. (Eds). Dimensions of Phonological Sretss. Retrieved from
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=4732913, Created from purdue on 2017-06-06 07:50:43.

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics