Anne Fernald

TL;DR: Findings were that significant disparities in vocabulary and language processing efficiency were already evident at 18 months between infants from higher- and lower-SES families, and by 24 months there was a 6-month gap between SES groups in processing skills critical to language development.

TL;DR: Mediation analyses showed that the effect of child-directed speech on expressive vocabulary was explained by infants’ language-processing efficiency, which suggests that richer language experience strengthens processing skills that facilitate language growth.

TL;DR: The motherese speech register used by adults with infants and young children is linguistically simplified and characterized by high pitch and exaggerated intonation as discussed by the authors, and infants showed a significant listening preference for the motheresee speech register.

TL;DR: Results showed cross-language consistency in the patterns of prosodic modification used in parental speech to infants, and suggested that language-specific variations are also important, and that the findings of the numerous studies of early language input based on American English are not necessarily generalisable to other cultures.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated possible acoustic determinants of the infant listening preference for motherese speech found by Fernald (1985), and found that infants showed a significant preference for the fundamental frequency (Fo) patterns and amplitude (Amplitude), but not for amplitude or duration patterns.