Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed Speech Preference
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-16-2020
Publication Title
Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
Volume
3
Issue
1
First page number:
24
Last page number:
52
Abstract
Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure.
Keywords
language acquisition, speech perception, infant-directed speech, reproducibility, experimental methods, open data, open materials, preregistered
Disciplines
Linguistics | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Language
English
Repository Citation
The ManyBabies Consortium,
Rennels, J. L.
(2020).
Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed Speech Preference.
Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(1),
24-52.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2515245919900809