Related papers: Learning to Understand Child-directed and Adult-di…
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…
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…
We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a…
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…
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,…
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…
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 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…
Speech processing techniques are useful for analyzing speech and language development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who are often varied and delayed in acquiring these skills. Early identification and intervention are…
Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how these adult inferences as listeners reflect…
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…
While high-performing language models are typically trained on hundreds of billions of words, human children become fluent language users with a much smaller amount of data. What are the features of the data they receive, and how do these…
Interactions involving children span a wide range of important domains from learning to clinical diagnostic and therapeutic contexts. Automated analyses of such interactions are motivated by the need to seek accurate insights and offer…
Seminal work by Huebner et al. (2021) showed that language models (LMs) trained on English Child-Directed Language (CDL) can reach similar syntactic abilities as LMs trained on much larger amounts of adult-directed written text, suggesting…
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…
Children speech recognition is challenging mainly due to the inherent high variability in children's physical and articulatory characteristics and expressions. This variability manifests in both acoustic constructs and linguistic usage due…
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…
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by challenges in social communication, repetitive behavior, and sensory processing. One important research area in ASD is evaluating children's behavioral…
We present a syntactic dependency treebank for naturalistic child and child-directed speech in English (MacWhinney, 2000). Our annotations largely followed the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies project (UD (Zeman et al., 2022)), with…
Acoustic modeling for child speech is challenging due to the high acoustic variability caused by physiological differences in the vocal tract. The dearth of publicly available datasets makes the task more challenging. In this work, we…