English-Speaking Adults' Labeling of Child- and Adult-Directed Speech Across Languages and Its Relationship to Perception of Affect

Abstract

Child-directed speech, as a specialized form of speech directed toward young children, has been found across numerous languages around the world and has been suggested as a universal feature of human experience. However, variation in its implementation and the extent to which it is culturally supported has called its universality into question. Child-directed speech has also been posited to be associated with expression of positive affect or "happy talk." Here, we examined Canadian English-speaking adults' ability to discriminate child-directed from adult-directed speech samples from two dissimilar language/cultural communities; an urban Farsi-speaking population, and a rural, horticulturalist Tseltal Mayan speaking community. We also examined the relationship between participants' addressee classification and ratings of positive affect. Naive raters could successfully classify CDS in Farsi, but only trained raters were successful with the Tseltal Mayan sample. Associations with some affective ratings were found for the Farsi samples, but not reliably for happy speech. These findings point to a complex relationship between perception of affect and CDS, and context-specific effects on the ability to classify CDS across languages.

Keywords: child-directed speech; cross-language perception; infant-directed speech; positive affect; universality.

Figure 1

Average rating of each of the positive affect measures by addressee. The error bars represent the 95% CIs. The rating scale was 1–5 with 1 being “extremely not sounding” like that emotion, 3 being neutral, and 5 being “sounded extremely” like that emotion. Thus, average ratings >3 suggest a tendency to rate the speech as containing this emotion and values <3 suggest the speech was rated as not sounding like that emotion.

Figure 2

Levels of sounded Happy (top left), sounded Loving (top right), sounds Soothing (bottom left), and sounded Exaggerated (bottom right) for the interactions with Addressee for Experiment 1. The log odds of each affect level are plotted on the y-axis and the shaded areas represent the 95% CIs. The interactions between Addressee and Loving, Soothing and Exaggerated were significant. Neutral is graphed on the left as it was the reference level.

Figure 3

Average ratings of the positive affect measures by addressee from Experiment 2b. The error bars represent the 95% CIs. The ratings on this scale were from 1 to 5 with 1 being neutral and 5 being “sounded extremely” like that emotion.

Figure 4

Levels of sounded Happy (top left), sounded Loving (top right), sounds Soothing (bottom left), and sounded Excited (bottom right) for the interactions with Addressee in Experiment 2b. The log odds of each affect level are plotted on the y-axis and the shaded areas represent the 95% CIs. Only the interaction between Addressee and Excited was significant.