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Speech to Infants as Hyperspeech: Knowledge-Driven Processes in Early Word Recognition

  • Anne Fernald
Published/Copyright: August 22, 2000

Abstract

The intelligibility of a word in continuous speech depends on the clarity of the word and on linguistic and nonlinguistic contextual information available to the listener. Despite limited knowledge of language and the world, infants in the first 2 years are already beginning to make use of contextual information in processing speech. Adults interacting with infants tend to modify their speech in ways that serve to maximize predictability for the immature listener by highlighting focussed words and using frequent repetition and formulaic utterances. Infant-directed speech is viewed as a form of ‘hyperspeech’ which facilities comprehension, not by modifying phonetic properties of individual words but rather by providing contextual support on perceptual levels accessible to infants even in the earliest stages of language learning.


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Published Online: 2000-08-22
Published in Print: 2000-12-01

© 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Special Section
  2. Title Page
  3. Foreword
  4. Acoustic Patterning of Speech Its Linguistic and Physiological Bases
  5. Investigating Unscripted Speech: Implications for Phonetics and Phonology
  6. Emotive Transforms
  7. The Source-Filter Frame of Prominence
  8. The C/D Model and Prosodic Control of Articulatory Behavior
  9. Diverse Acoustic Cues at Consonantal Landmarks
  10. Perceptual Processing
  11. Modeling and Perception of ‘Gesture Reduction’
  12. General Auditory Processes Contribute to Perceptual Accommodation of Coarticulation
  13. Adaptive Dispersion in Vowel Perception
  14. Language Acquisition as Complex Category Formation
  15. Biology of Communication and Motor Processes
  16. Singing Birds, Playing Cats, and Babbling Babies: Why Do They Do It?
  17. The Phonetic Potential of Nonhuman Vocal Tracts: Comparative Cineradiographic Observations of Vocalizing Animals
  18. Dynamic Simulation of Human Movement Using Large-Scale Models of the Body
  19. En Route to Adult Spoken Language / Language Development
  20. An Embodiment Perspective on the Acquisition of Speech Perception
  21. Speech to Infants as Hyperspeech: Knowledge-Driven Processes in Early Word Recognition
  22. The Construction of a First Phonology
  23. Auditory Constraints on Sound Structures
  24. Searching for an Auditory Description of Vowel Categories
  25. Commentary
  26. Imitation and the Emergence of Segments
  27. Deriving Speech from Nonspeech: A View from Ontogeny
  28. Paper
  29. Developmental Origins of Adult Phonology: The Interplay between Phonetic Emergents and the Evolutionary Adaptations of Sound Patterns
  30. Further Section
  31. Publications Björn Lindblom
  32. Index autorum Vol. 57, 2000
  33. Contents Vol. 57, 2000
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