University of Antwerp, Computational Linguistics & Psycholinguistics (CLiPS) Research Center, Belgium.
J Child Lang. 2023 Sep;50(5):1184-1203. doi: 10.1017/S0305000922000289. Epub 2022 Jun 27.
The aim of this study was to investigate the acoustic vowel space area in infant directed speech (IDS). The research question is whether the vowel space is expanded or remains constant in IDS. A corpus of spontaneous interactions of 9 dyads followed monthly from the age of 6 to 24 months was analyzed. The occurrences in the parents' speech of each word that the children eventually acquired were extracted. The surface of the vowel triangle and the convex hull of all vowels were computed. The main result is that the development of the vowel space in IDS follows an inverted U-shaped curve: the vowel space starts relatively small, gradually increases as the child's first word use approaches, and decreases again afterwards. These findings show that parents adapt their articulation to the evolving linguistic abilities of their child, and this adaptation can be detected at the level of individual lexical items.
本研究旨在探讨婴儿指向言语（IDS）中的声学元音空间区域。研究问题是元音空间在 IDS 中是扩展还是保持不变。分析了 9 对 6 至 24 个月逐月进行的自然互动语料库。提取了儿童最终习得的每个单词在父母言语中的出现情况。计算了元音三角形的表面和所有元音的凸包。主要结果是，IDS 中元音空间的发展遵循倒 U 形曲线：元音空间最初相对较小，随着儿童首次使用单词的临近逐渐增加，之后再次减小。这些发现表明，父母会根据孩子不断发展的语言能力来调整他们的发音，这种适应可以在单个词汇项目的水平上检测到。
