Leiden University Student Repository

Gupta, Anna Ivanovna (2018)

The Preference of Dutch Monolingual Infants for Infant-Directed Speech over Adult-Directed Speech: a Contribution to the ManyBabies 1 Project

Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)

The current thesis investigates the preference of Dutch monolingual infants for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Our study is a contribution to the ManyBabies 1 project (Bergmann et al., 2018), which is the first large-scale replication project in infant research. We use the head-turn preference procedure and test all the infants at the age of 8-12 months with the stimuli in North American English. We hypothesize that the infants in the present study prefer IDS to ADS because of IDS exaggerated prosodic properties. The linguistic content of the stimuli is not available to the infants because the stimuli are in English, a language they have not been exposed to before. Moreover, we want to find out if there is any difference between younger (8-month-olds) and older infants (11-month-olds). Previous research has demonstrated that younger infants show a more reliable preference for IDS over ADS in comparison with older infants. We statistically analyze the...Show moreThe current thesis investigates the preference of Dutch monolingual infants for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Our study is a contribution to the ManyBabies 1 project (Bergmann et al., 2018), which is the first large-scale replication project in infant research. We use the head-turn preference procedure and test all the infants at the age of 8-12 months with the stimuli in North American English. We hypothesize that the infants in the present study prefer IDS to ADS because of IDS exaggerated prosodic properties. The linguistic content of the stimuli is not available to the infants because the stimuli are in English, a language they have not been exposed to before. Moreover, we want to find out if there is any difference between younger (8-month-olds) and older infants (11-month-olds). Previous research has demonstrated that younger infants show a more reliable preference for IDS over ADS in comparison with older infants. We statistically analyze the results using a linear-mixed effects model because of its advantages such as taking into consideration random variables and dealing well with non-normal data.Show less

infant-directed speech

preference

pitch

replication crisis

Author

Gupta, Anna Ivanovna

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisors

Levelt, Claartje

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en