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Phonetic variation in English infant-directed speech: A large-scale corpus analysis

Abstract

Learning sound categories is central to language acquisition - but we know little about the extent of phonetic variability in the learner's input. In this study, we phonetically annotated coronal segments (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, and /n/) in a corpus of naturalistic American English infant-directed speech (IDS). We did not find evidence that IDS is consistently more canonical than adult-directed speech (ADS), challenging the notion of IDS as a learning register. While IDS is not more canonical than ADS overall, the canonical form was nonetheless the most frequent form in IDS for all segments except /t/. We also considered how infants may move beyond the task of identifying the canonical form to how they may learn to cluster allophones; for this purpose, we quantified the dissimilarity in the phonological environments of the variants in question. Lastly, we investigated a case in which the overwhelming majority of instantiations were not canonical - word-final t and d - and demonstrated that morphologically-conditioned suffixes were more canonical than other word final segments. This corpus is a vital step towards understanding how infants can learn to categorize sounds from their input and will be an invaluable tool for future sociolinguistic, computational and theoretical modeling of language learning. CO 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

article Article
date_range 2023
language English
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Featured Keywords

Phonetic categories
Allophones
Corpus
Morphology
Acquisition
Pronunciation variants
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