Investigation of prosody and language in mother-baby interaction

Abstract

Child-directed speech, also referred to as motherese, has some specific prosodic patterns that attract the baby to interaction and contribute to the entrance of the baby into the universe of language. Under this perspective, this quantitative and qualitative, cross-sectional study aimed to investigate the relation between the prosodic patterns of maternal speech and the constitution of the mother-baby interactive process, as well as discuss the importance of this early experience to the language acquisition process. Data collection was performed through a semi-structured interview with mothers and audio and video recording of the mother-baby interaction. The results obtained from the maternal speech spectrograms, analyzed in PRAAT® software, and from the baby’s reaction show that the mother ideates her child as a dialogical partner, and that both are attracted by the specific prosodic properties of motherese, given by decreased speech rate and increased vocal range, which reveals that maternal prosody performs a linguistic function since the early months of life. It is expected that this research will support the acknowledgement of maternal prosody’s relevance to mother-baby interaction, through which it is possible to follow the linguistic development of the baby, in addition to enabling the early detection of disturbances.