Infants of Depressed Mothers, Although Competent Learners, Fail to Learn in Response to Their Own Mothers' Infant-Directed Speech

Depressed mothers use less of the exaggerated prosody that is typical of infant-directed (ID) speech than do nondepressed mothers. We investigated the consequences of this reduced perceptual salience in ID speech for infant learning. Infants of nondepressed mothers readily learned that their moth…