• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.23-32
• /
• 2014

This study presents the prosodic characteristics of 'Motherese' and 'Teacherese (child care teacher and kindergarten teacher)'. 21 mothers and 24 teachers spoke to children in the child care center or kindergarten. Children are in their 4;00-6;11. Speech and articulation rate, number of accentual phrases (APs), number of intonational phrases (IPs), pitch-related factors (f0, pitch range, f0 standard deviation), and intonation slope (mean Absolute, f0, q-tone slope) were measured. 2 groups spoke 2 sentential types (interrogative_ alternative question, declarative_ coordinated sentence) in 2 situations (one accompanied with the children, the other done without children, but pretending as if they were in front of the children). The results indicate that teachers show more noticeable prosodic characteristics than mothers do.