We investigate the role of prosody in child-directed speech of three English speaking adults using data collected for the Human Speechome Project, an ecologically valid, longitudinal corpus collected from the home of a family with a young child. We looked at differences in prosody between child-directed and adult-directed speech. We also looked at the change in prosody of child-directed speech as the child gets older. Results showed significant interactions between speech type and vowel duration, mean F0 and F0 range. We also found significant changes in prosody in child-directed speech as the child gets older.

Index Terms: prosody,prosodic exaggeration, duration, fundamental frequency, child-directed speech, adult-direct speech, longitudinal, naturalistic, English