Sounds of Infant-Directed Vocabulary: Learned from Infants' Speech or Part of Linguistic Knowledge?

Abstract

Mothers use some segments selectively when talking to infants and young children. We examined why particular segments are favored over others by examining college-aged Japanese adults' ratings of how good a nonsense word sounds as an item of infant-directed vocabulary (IDV). Adults' ratings were highly consistent with mothers' actual use of segments in IDV, as well as the predictions of Jakobson's principle of maximal contrast. They suggest that Japanese adults possess an intuitive sense of what a good IDV should sound like, which is a part of underlying linguistic knowledge of Japanese phonology rather than learned from children.