Wyrazy n-fonemowe i n-sylabowe w mowie dorosłych adresowanej do niemowląt

N-phoneme and N-syllable expressions in adult speech directed to infants Studies devoted to phonostatic research have made clear that there is a correlation between the frequency of words of a certain phoneme and syllable length and their adherence to certain stylistic variations of Polish. The fact of the occurrence of a higher number of shorter or longer words depending on the type of analysed expressions was noticed by linguists at the beginning of the 20th century, although most of these opinions were not yet supported by a proper quantity of data. Such data began to published in the 1970s. My article presents results concerning the frequency of n-phoneme and n-syllable words in a particular, simplified register of infant-directed speech (IDS). A comparison of the frequency of the occurrence of words of a certain phoneme and syllable length in IDS with the data obtained from other speech samples, among them the Polish of pre-schoolers and contemporary Polish, allows one to state that the length of words may be one of the most important criteria evidencing the “difference” of infant-directed speech. The analysed language material (cassette recording) came from 102 child-carers (mothers, fathers and grandmothers). It was listened to, phonologically transcribed and entered into a computer memory by one person. All of the analysed text consisted of 74,534 words (308,918 phonemes).