Infants' Listening Preferences: Baby Talk or Happy Talk?

TLDR

Infants have been reported to prefer baby talk over adult‑directed speech, yet prior studies did not control for affect differences between the registers. These experiments sought to disentangle the influence of affect and speech register on 6‑month‑olds’ listening preferences by independently manipulating both factors. When affect was held constant, no register preference emerged; when ADS conveyed more positive affect, infants preferred ADS, and pitch alone was neither necessary nor sufficient, indicating that the baby‑talk preference reflects a general preference for positively affective speech rather than specific prosodic cues.

Abstract

Abstract The most robust finding on infants' listening preferences has been widely characterized as a preference for baby talk (BT) over adult‐directed speech (ADS). Although prosodic modifications characteristic of BT also convey positive affect, differences in affect across BT and ADS speech registers have not been controlled in previous studies. This set of experiments sought to elucidate the basis for 6‐month‐olds' listening preference by independently manipulating affect and speech register. When affect was held constant, no preference for any speech register was observed. Moreover, when ADS stimuli presented more positive affect than BT stimuli, infants' preferences followed the positive affect. Higher and more variable pitch was neither necessary nor sufficient for determining infants' preferences, although pitch characteristics may modulate affect‐based preferences. The BT preference is thus attributable to a more general preference for speech that imparts relatively positive affect, a preference perhaps ascribable to a preexisting general‐purpose mechanism opportunistically exploited by language.