Parents tune their vowels to the emergence of children's words.

The aim of this study was to investigate the acoustic vowel space area in infant directed speech (IDS). The research question is whether the vowel space is expanded or remains constant in IDS. A corpus of spontaneous interactions of 9 dyads followed monthly from the age of 6 to 24 months was analyzed.

Tailoring the Input to Children's Needs: The Use of Fine Lexical Tuning in Speech Directed to Normally Hearing Children and Children With Cochlear Implants.

The aim of the present study was to explore fine lexical tuning in Dutch infant-directed speech (IDS) addressed to congenitally deaf infants who received a cochlear implant (CI) early in life (<2 years of age) in comparison with children with normal hearing (NH). The longitudinal pattern of parents' utterance length in the initial stages of the child's lexical development was examined. Parents' utterances containing the words the children eventually acquired in the earliest developmental stages were selected and their MLU (Mean Length of Utterance) was measured.

Fine lexical tuning in infant directed speech to typically developing children.

Do parents fine-tune the MLU of utterances with a particular word as the word is on the verge of appearing in the child's production? We analyzed a corpus of spontaneous interactions of 30 dyads. The children were in the initial stages of their lexical development, and the parents' utterances containing the words the children eventually acquired were selected. The main finding is that the MLU of the parental utterances containing the target words gradually decreased up to the point of the children's first production of those words.