Mature neural responses to infant-directed speech but not adult-directed speech in pre-verbal infants

Infant directed speech (IDS), the speech register adults use when talking to infants, has been shown to have positive effects on attracting infants’ attention, language learning, and emotional communication. Here event related potentials (ERPs) are used to investigate the neural coding of IDS and ADS (adult directed speech) as well as their discrimination by both infants and adults. Two instances of the vowel /i/, one extracted from ADS and one from IDS, were presented to 9-month-old infants and adults in two oddball conditions: ADS standard/IDS deviant and IDS standard/ADS deviant. In Experiment 1 with adults, the obligatory ERPs that code acoustic information were different for ADS and IDS; and discrimination, indexed by mismatch negativity (MMN) responses, showed that IDS and ADS deviants were discriminated equally well; although, the P3a response was larger for IDS suggesting it captured adults’ attention more than did ADS. In infants the obligatory responses did not differ for IDS and ADS, but for discrimination, while IDS deviants generated both a slow-positive mismatch response (MMR) as well as an adult-like MMN, the ADS deviants generated only an MMR. The presence of a mature adult-like MMN suggests that the IDS stimulus is easier to discriminate for infants.