Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The exaggerated intonation and special rhythmic properties ofinfant-directed speech (IDS) have been hypothesized to attractinfant’s attention to the speech stream. However, studiesinvestigating IDS in the context of models of attention arefew. A number of such models suggest that surprising ornovel perceptual inputs attract attention, where novelty can beoperationalized as the statistical predictability of the stimulusin a context. Since prosodic patterns such as F0 contours areaccessible to young infants who are also adept statisticallearners, the present paper investigates a hypothesis that pitchcontours in IDS are less predictable than those in adult-directed speech (ADS), thereby efficiently tapping into thebasic attentional mechanisms of the listeners. Results fromanalyses with naturalistic IDS and ADS speech show that IDShas lower overall predictability of intonation acrossneighboring syllables even when the F0 contours in bothspeaking styles are normalized to the same frequency range.