Related papers: Infant directed speech is consistent with teaching
The iterated learning model is an agent model which simulates the transmission of of language from generation to generation. It is used to study how the language adapts to pressures imposed by transmission. In each iteration, a language…
Infants' ability to recognize and categorize objects develops gradually. The second year of life is marked by both the emergence of more semantic visual representations and a better understanding of word meaning. This suggests that language…
Recent studies highlight the potential of large language models in creating educational tools for children, yet significant challenges remain in maintaining key child-specific properties such as linguistic nuances, cognitive needs, and…
Disfluencies are prevalent in spontaneous speech, as shown in many studies of adult speech. Less is understood about children's speech, especially in pre-school children who are still developing their language skills. We present a novel…
Adapting generic speech recognition models to specific individuals is a challenging problem due to the scarcity of personalized data. Recent works have proposed boosting the amount of training data using personalized text-to-speech…
Humans are efficient language learners and inherently social creatures. Our language development is largely shaped by our social interactions, for example, the demonstration and feedback from caregivers. Contrary to human language learning,…
Synthetic data generated by text-to-speech (TTS) systems can be used to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in low-resource or domain mismatch tasks. It has been shown that TTS-generated outputs still do not have the same…
Humans use audio signals in the form of spoken language or verbal reactions effectively when teaching new skills or tasks to other humans. While demonstrations allow humans to teach robots in a natural way, learning from trajectories alone…
Spurred by advancements in scale, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong few-shot learning ability via in-context learning (ICL). However, the performance of ICL has been shown to be highly sensitive to the selection of…
Many recently published Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems produce audio close to real speech. However, TTS evaluation needs to be revisited to make sense of the results obtained with the new architectures, approaches and datasets. We propose…
We introduce Seed-TTS, a family of large-scale autoregressive text-to-speech (TTS) models capable of generating speech that is virtually indistinguishable from human speech. Seed-TTS serves as a foundation model for speech generation and…
Rapid progress in machine learning for natural language processing has the potential to transform debates about how humans learn language. However, the learning environments and biases of current artificial learners and humans diverge in…
The emergence of voice-assistant devices ushers in delightful user experiences not just on the smart home front, but also in diverse educational environments from classrooms to personalized-learning/tutoring. However, the use of voice as an…
The success of neural language models (LMs) on many technological tasks has brought about their potential relevance as scientific theories of language despite some clear differences between LM training and child language acquisition. In…
Speech foundation models, trained on vast datasets, have opened unique opportunities in addressing challenging low-resource speech understanding, such as child speech. In this work, we explore the capabilities of speech foundation models on…
Phonology typically describes speech in terms of discrete signs like features. The field of intonational phonology uses discrete accents to describe intonation and prosody. But, are such representations useful? The results of mimicry…
Understanding speech production both visually and kinematically can inform second language learning system designs, as well as the creation of speaking characters in video games and animations. In this work, we introduce a data-driven…
Online dialogic instructions are a set of pedagogical instructions used in real-world online educational contexts to motivate students, help understand learning materials, and build effective study habits. In spite of the popularity and…
Interactive storytelling is vital for preschooler development. While children's interactive partners have traditionally been their parents and teachers, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a surge of AI-based…
Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems are able to generate audio that sounds almost as natural as human speech. However, the bar of developing high-quality TTS systems remains high since a sizable set of studio-quality <text, audio> pairs is…