From wiggles to words: Acoustic and linguistic patterns in caregiver–child museum interactions

Child-directed speech (CDS) engages infants and young children using simplified language and exaggerated prosody (Jones et al., 2023). Recent work shows that caregivers adjust speech/language features to cater toward older children as well (Hämäläinen et al., 2018; Shi et al., 2020). Children’s museums offer a valuable resource in communities to encourage families to engage and learn together and are natural, ecologically valid settings for data collection. This study examines (1) the relationship between caregiver prosody and caregiver linguistic complexity, hypothesizing that more prosodic variation will correlate with less complex language, and (2) whether adult prosodic patterns and linguistic complexity are reflected in child speech and language during museum exploration, hypothesizing that children whose caregivers use high linguistic complexity and low prosodic variation will have stronger language skills. Twenty-minute audio recordings of exhibit exploration were analyzed for 36 caregiver–child dyads (3–6 years old). Files are transcribed following SALT conventions (SALT, 2023) and acoustically analyzed using Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2024). Linguistic complexity measures including mean length utterance, subordination index, and type-token ratio are reported. Prosodic measures of wiggliness and spaciousness are extracted to provide data on prosodic variation over time (Wehrle, 2022). Ongoing analyses examine measures to address stated hypotheses.