Abstract Adults and children across different cultures speak to infants and young children with a special child-directed register characterized by higher and more varied pitch. The function of the acoustic modifications in child-directed speech has been a long-standing issue. The Hyperarticulation theory proposes that child-directed speech enhances the important cues for speech and language processing, which promotes language acquisition. The Affect theory postulates that affectionate emotions conveyed in child-directed speech capture children’s attention and promote language learning. This talk will present two studies. The first study tested these two competing theories by comparing the perceptual and acoustic-phonetic characteristics of child-directed and […]
Abstract: Films have attracted interests from different disciplines. One crucial question discussed by psychologists is whether a film interacts with the human emotional system. Experiments on film viewers' self-projection, identification with film characters, or immediate neural responses have been evidence of film's affective power. However, the study on the contents of viewers' viewing experience is less explored due to the shortage of their immediate comments on ongoing stories. In the past decade, the advent of bullet-screen, an interactive video comment featured by many Asian video-sharing platforms, has made it possible to explore time-synchronic video comments. With bullet-screen, which is […]
