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We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate wordform learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, weexamine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic andphonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At theacoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, therealizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than inADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction:the IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) thanthe ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics togetherin a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation oflexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for theopposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms arestill globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effectis numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the viewthat the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.

Are words easier to learn from infant- than adult-directed speech? A quantitative corpus-based investigation