INTERSPEECH 2004 - ICSLP 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing Jeju Island, Korea October 4-8, 2004

Developmental Changes in Voiced-Segment Ratio for Japanese Infants and Parents

Shigeaki Amano, Tomohiro Nakatani, Tadahisa Kondo

NTT Corporation, Japan

Utterances of five Japanese infants and their parents were recorded longitudinally and used to develop an infant speech database. This database was used to analyze the voiced-segment ratio to investigate the developmental changes in utterances produced by infants and parents. The voiced-segment ratio is the ratio of the summed duration of a voiced segment to the total utterance duration. The analyses showed that the ratio tends to increase in an infant's utterances before the infant starts to produce 2-word sentences. The analyses also showed that, at the same stage, the ratio is higher in parents' infant-directed speech than in parents' adult-directed speech. These results suggest that the voiced-segment ratio reflects the development of an infant's utterance ability, and that a higher voiced-segment ratio is one of the characteristics of infant-directed speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Amano, Shigeaki / Nakatani, Tomohiro / Kondo, Tadahisa (2004): "Developmental changes in voiced-segment ratio for Japanese infants and parents", In INTERSPEECH-2004, 1853-1856.