Discriminating between mothers’ infant- and adult-directed speech: Cross-linguistic generalizability from Japanese to Italian and German

• Main Authors: Sulpizio, Simone, Kuroda, Kaori, Dalsasso, Matteo, Asakawa, Tetsuya, Bornstein, Marc H., Doi, Hirokazu, Esposito, Gianluca, Shinohara, Kazuyuki
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Cross-language; Motherese
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/86267; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/43946
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The aim of the present work was a cross-linguistic generalization of Inoue et al.’s (2011) algorithm for discriminating infant- (IDS) vs. adult-directed speech (ADS). IDS is the way in which mothers communicate with infants; it is a universal communicative property, with some cross-linguistic differences. Inoue et al. (2011) implemented a machine algorithm that, by using a mel-frequency cepstral coefficient and a hidden Markov model, discriminated IDS from ADS in Japanese. We applied the original algorithm to two other languages that are very different from Japanese – Italian and German – and then tested the algorithm on Italian and German databases of IDS and ADS. Our results showed that: First, in accord with the extant literature, IDS is realized in a similar way across languages; second, the algorithm performed well in both languages and close to that reported for Japanese. The implications for the algorithm are discussed.