Does infant-directed speech in Tagalog resemble infant-directed speech in American English?

This study compared the speech of a Filipino mother in infant- and adult-directed speech in order to investigate whether the mother used the acoustic features typically found in the infant-directed speech of American English-speaking mothers. Little acoustic documentation is available on the acoustic features of Tagalog, and no acoustic comparison of speech registers has so far been conducted. Impressionistically, Tagalog-speaking mothers’ do not appear to use the features typically found in American mothers speech to their young infants. The mother was recorded talking to her infant and to another adult native speaker of Tagalog. Recordings were made in the mother’s home and visits occurred during the first 6 months of the infant’s life. Specific acoustic features analyzed include (a) vowel duration, (b) vowel format frequencies, (c) vowel triangle size, (d) rate of speech, (e) fundamental frequency, and (f) F0 range. Morphological and syntactic features were also analyzed, including (g) mean length of utterance and (h) sentence length. Results support a need for further study of speech registers in Filipino mothers.