Fernald, Anne (1989)
FERNALD, Anne. “Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers’ Speech to Infants: Is the Melody the Message?” Child Development 60 (1989): 1497-1510.
Conducted a perceptual study, using 40 experienced parents and 40 students inexperienced with infants as informants. Stimuli were recordings were made of both infant-directed and adult-directed speech of 5 mothers of 12-month-old preverbal infants, which were then filtered to eliminate linguistic content, leaving only the prosodic information of each utterance. Subjects were asked to identify (forced choice) the speaker’s intent for each utterance (attention-bid, approval, prohibition, comfort, game/telephone). Listeners were able to deduce speakers’ intentions far more accurately for infant-directed speech than for adult-directed speech. This lead the researchers to conclude that the prosodic patterns of infant-directed speech are not only more animated but more informative than for adult-directed speech, and that these may provide reliable cues to preverbal infants in comprehending speaker’s intent.
