Infant Preferences for Structural and Prosodic Properties of Infant‐Directed Speech in the Second Year of Life

• DOI: 10.1111/infa.12077
• Publication Date: 2015-03-16T05:49:10Z
• Authors: Judith Segal; Rochelle S. Newman
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences

While a large literature discusses young infants' preference for an infant‐directed speaking style, few studies have explored preferences after the first year. The present work compares infants' preference for two different properties of IDS speech: prosodic changes (primarily pitch and pitch variability) and structural properties (utterance length; lexical repetition). We found that both 12‐ and 16‐month‐old infants continued to prefer listening to speech with the prosodic properties of IDS, but neither age showed any preference for speech with the lexical repetition and short utterances typical of IDS.