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Adults modify their speech when they talk to infants and young children. This style of speech is called “Infant-directed speech” (IDS). Research has shown that IDS differs from ADS in multiple ways, for example, phonologically, lexically, syntactically, as well as pragmatically. Many of these features have been argued to contribute to attracting and maintaining infants’ attention, communicating affects, as well as facilitating their language acquisition (Soderstrom, 2007, for review). Yet, it is still not clear how adults would know what to say in IDS. In this presentation, we focus on the specific ways IDS favors certain segments over others and ask how adults would know which segments to use selectively in IDS. The prominent view in the field is that mothers (and other adults) fine-tune their production to infants’ capabilities such that segments that are produced early by infants are favored over those that are not produced until later (the “fine-tuning hypothesis,” Cross, 1977). The implication of this hypothesis is that mothers’ productions are either imitations of children’s immature production, or more generally learned through their interaction with their children. In the present paper, we argue for an alternative possibility that is based on Morton’s Motivation-Structure Rule Hypothesis, MSRH (1977). He proposed that there is a general relationship between the physical structures of sounds and the motivation underlying their use in animal communication. Considering that human adults’ use of IDS is also motivated by their desire to communicate their intensions and affects with infants, the selective use of certain sounds in IDS may be also explained by MSRH. If true, it predicts that IDS would arise from MSRH, and need not be learned from infants. 290

A potential link between infant-directed speech and evolution of vocal communication