Related papers: Are words easier to learn from infant- than adult-…
Speech directed to children differs from adult-directed speech in linguistic aspects such as repetition, word choice, and sentence length, as well as in aspects of the speech signal itself, such as prosodic and phonemic variation. Human…
Infant-directed speech (IDS) has distinctive properties that differ from adult-directed speech (ADS). Why it has these properties -- and whether they are intended to facilitate language learning -- is matter of contention. We argue that…
Infant-directed speech (IDS) is highly rhythmic, and in European languages IDS is dominated by patterns of amplitude modulation (AM) at ~2Hz (reflecting prosody) and ~5Hz (reflecting individual syllables). The rhythm structure of spoken…
Modelling of early language acquisition aims to understand how infants bootstrap their language skills. The modelling encompasses properties of the input data used for training the models, the cognitive hypotheses and their algorithmic…
The present study examined whether infant-directed (ID) speech facilitates intersensory matching of audio--visual fluent speech in 12-month-old infants. German-learning infants\^a audio--visual matching ability of German and French fluent…
Is child-directed language (CDL) optimized to support language learning, and which aspects of linguistic development does it facilitate? We investigate this question using neural language models trained on CDL versus adult-directed language…
How do adults understand children's speech? Children's productions over the course of language development often bear little resemblance to typical adult pronunciations, yet caregivers nonetheless reliably recover meaning from them. Here,…
The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of…
Diagnostic procedures for ASD (autism spectrum disorder) involve semi-naturalistic interactions between the child and a clinician. Computational methods to analyze these sessions require an end-to-end speech and language processing pipeline…
Acoustics-to-word models are end-to-end speech recognizers that use words as targets without relying on pronunciation dictionaries or graphemes. These models are notoriously difficult to train due to the lack of linguistic knowledge. It is…
Child-directed speech (CDS) is a particular type of speech that adults use when addressing young children. Its properties also change as a function of extralinguistic factors, such as age of the child being addressed. Access to large…
Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variability across words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-based…
One of the many tasks facing the typically-developing child language learner is learning to discriminate between the distinctive sounds that make up words in their native language. Here we investigate whether multimodal…
In earlier work, we have shown that articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech (CDS) increases as a function of the age of the child, even when utterance length and differences in articulation rate between subjects are controlled…
Some researchers claim that language acquisition is critically dependent on experiencing linguistic input in order of increasing complexity. We set out to test this hypothesis using a simple recurrent neural network (SRN) trained to predict…
This paper presents a macroscopic approach to automatic detection of speech sound disorder (SSD) in child speech. Typically, SSD is manifested by persistent articulation and phonological errors on specific phonemes in the language. The…
Instruction-guided text-to-speech (ITTS) enables users to control speech generation through natural language prompts, offering a more intuitive interface than traditional TTS. However, the alignment between user style instructions and…
Human infants acquire their verbal lexicon with minimal prior knowledge of language based on the statistical properties of phonological distributions and the co-occurrence of other sensory stimuli. This study proposes a novel fully…
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…
In the domain of unsupervised learning most work on speech has focused on discovering low-level constructs such as phoneme inventories or word-like units. In contrast, for written language, where there is a large body of work on…