Why does infant-directed speech (IDS) with exaggerated prosody improve word segmentation accuracy, unlike adult-directed speech?

💡 Explanation

Infant-directed speech enhances word segmentation due to exaggerated prosodic contours, which facilitate statistical learning of word boundaries, because these contours provide salient cues to potential word onsets. Therefore, IDS aids segmentation, rather than inhibiting learning through reduced variability or simplified phonetic encoding as in the other options.

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