About the project
Parents naturally adopt Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) techniques such as exaggerating and varying their voice pitch and hyper-articulating sounds when communicating to their infants. IDS has been shown to be universal, and parents utilize it to help their infants acquire early language skills. These interpretations, however, have been called into question by new advanced acoustic studies of IDS and several limitations in prior research (primarily in English).
IDS acoustic characteristics and their role in phonological discrimination, word comprehension, and word generation in six- to 18-month-old Norwegian-speaking children are examined in this study, which is ongoing.
The pitch and duration of the Norwegian language are used to communicate meaning. Would parents who speak Norwegian place an even greater emphasis on these words while conversing with their children? What is the relationship between IDS variation and newborns' ability to communicate? How do other clues help Norwegian infants acquire a new language if parents don't exaggerate pitch or hyper-articulate?