AIRS 1st Annual Meeting: 2009

Title: From song to speech? Infant-directed singing in the first year of life
Authors: Simone Falk (Ludwid-Maximilians-Universitat, Germany)

Abstract

In this paper, I will demonstrate how rich and variable in form and situational context sung
speech to infants (infant-directed singing) is during the first year of life. It will be shown how it
is used as a communicative tool between parents and infants in daily child-care activities and
how the linguistic side of the song interacts with musical structure. This might be of special
interest for those AIRS researchers working on the boundaries of singing and speaking or
developmental aspects of singing. Examples will be given from a wide corpus of recordings
(600 items) of French, German and Russian parents (50) singing with their children. Regarding
the AIRS database, some problems of categorization or parametrization of infant-directed
singing will be addressed and discussed with the audience.