Simone FALK
German Linguistics, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich
» Does song cue linguistic structure during language acquisition ? A performance analysis of French, Russian and German infant-directed singing »
Infants learn important aspects of their native language in the first months of life via prosodic properties of the speech signal (“Prosodic Bootstrapping Hypothesis”). Spoken speech with infants is a well investigated research area in this respect. The properties of infant-directed sung speech, however, were so far not the focus of language acquisition research. This is quite surprising because sung speech occurs very frequently in child-care activities in the first year of life and it shares many properties with infant-directed speech which have been shown to be beneficial to speech perception in infants (e.g. slower articulation, salient pitch contours, regular rhythmic structure). In this presentation, I will give an overview over some performance properties of infant-directed singing and their possible relation to early steps in language acquisition. This will be done in a cross- linguistic perspective, i.e. by acoustic analysis of a rich corpus of German, French and Russian recordings of parents singing to their infants aged 2 to 13 months. The features discussed in this talk range from micro-prosodic segmental to macro-prosodic phrasal structure. First, I will show that segmental features of infant-directed singing as vowel space and variability/stability of vowels and consonants in the time-course of the signal underpin phonological aspects of the language and might enhance speech perception/word recognition. Second, it will be discussed how phrasal boundaries are marked in sung speech and how they could cue syntactic structure. Finally, I will give an outlook on ongoing experimental projects and ideas related to infant research concerning vowel structure/discrimination, and the perception of speech vs. music in the first year of life.