Onomatopoeia are frequently identified amongst infants' earliest words (Menn & Vihman, 2011), yet few authors have considered why this might be, and even fewer have explored this phenomenon empirically. Here we analyze mothers' production of onomatopoeia in infant-directed speech (IDS) to provide an input-based perspective on these forms.…

This study investigated the relation between lexical development and the production of prosodic prominence in disyllabic babble and words. Monthly recordings from nine typically developing Belgian-Dutch-speaking infants were analyzed from the onset of babbling until a cumulative vocabulary of 200 words was reached. The differentiation between the…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

The study examines prosodic characteristics of Hebrew speech directed to children between 0 ; 9-3 ; 0 years, based on longitudinal samples of 228,946 tokens (8,075 types). The distribution of prosodic patterns--the number of syllables and stress patterns--is analyzed across three lexical categories, distinguishing not only between open- and…

Early prosodic development (f[subscript 0] variation) was systematically measured in Mandarin-learning infants at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations of twenty-four infants aged 0;7 to 1;6 were recorded in 45-minute sessions. The speech production of twenty-four caregivers was also audio-recorded during…

Analysis of speech samples from British female adults (N=8) revealed that the subjects increased vocal pitch when addressing young children, but not as much as previously studied North American subjects did. Pitch increases were more commonly observed in free speech than in reading-aloud conditions. (23 references) (Author/CB)

Investigation of the communicative functions of pitch direction and range in one-year-olds (N=2) indicated that use of pitch among infants may be related to a period where communicative intentions are clearly defined, but language is not yet available. A higher pitch was observed among infants who made repeated requests for objects as opposed to…

Examination of the transition to purposive use of intonation with single words for two infants revealed that both clearly used rising tones to ask questions by 1.5 years of age and demonstrated widespread and gradual grammatical use of intonation. (Author/CB)