Infants' preference for and learning benefit from child-directed speech change over development, with CDS advantages diminishing by the third year¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2016 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Preference for CDS over ADS follows a U-shaped developmental pattern, and by 27 months children learn new words equally well from CDS and ADS. → Schwab Jessica F. 2016

Evidence¶

Schwab Jessica F. 2016¶

Schwab Jessica F., Lew-Williams Casey. (2016). Language learning, socioeconomic status, and child-directed speech. Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1393

q2 · i? · review · r2

The review reports studies showing younger infants (4–6 months) prefer CDS while those older than 7 months often do not, with preference re-emerging after 14 months, and one study showing no word-learning advantage of CDS at 27 months. No effect sizes are printed.

"One study showed that 27-month-old children were equally able to learn new words in both CDS and ADS."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Prosodic and sound-level features of child-directed speech support infants' phoneme discrimination, word segmentation, and word learning — related
• Structural features of child-directed speech—isolated words, short sentence frames, and repetition—facilitate word segmentation, processing, and word learning — related
• Maternal talk quantity at 18 months predicts Spanish-learning children's vocabulary size and vocabulary gains at 24 months, controlling for earlier vocabulary — related
• Social contingency in parent–child interaction supports early language learning, and infants actively elicit higher-quality input through a social feedback loop — related
• Infant look-away follows a U-shaped pattern of information content, consistent with maintaining intermediate rates of information absorption (Goldilocks effect) — related
• Child-directed speech predicts real-time language-processing efficiency at 19 and 24 months and explains gains in efficiency — related
• Overheard adult speech is unrelated to 24-month vocabulary, unlike child-directed speech — related
• Amount of child-directed speech at 19 months predicts expressive vocabulary size at 24 months in low-SES Spanish-learning infants — related