Tone and spectral features of child-directed speech in Catalan

Tone and spectral features of child-directed speech in Catalan. This preliminary work analyzes how Catalan educators interact with children aged from 3-6 in order to characterize child-directed speech (IDS) phonetically paying special attention to pitch and intelligibility features. In order to do it, we compared the voices of 8 female teachers speaking with an adult and with children. For each participant and condition, we have annotated in Praat between 2 and 6 minutes of conversation and extracted its mean pitch, pitch variability (using both standard deviation and Pitch Dynamism Quotient) and spectral slope, then we used Generalized Mixed Models in R to test the effect of the child-directed speech condition. The results are in line with previous studies for other languages and show that CDS higher in pitch (higher pitch mean), more variable (higher standard deviation and PDQ) and more intelligible (a less steep spectral slope and speaker's formant).