Related papers: Designing Building Blocks for Open-Ended Early Lit…

In second language vocabulary learning, existing works have primarily focused on either the learning interface or scheduling personalized retrieval practices to maximize memory retention. However, the learning content, i.e., the information…

Visual world studies show that upon hearing a word in a target-absent visual context containing related and unrelated items, toddlers and adults briefly direct their gaze towards phonologically related items, before shifting towards…

Around ten percent of children may present with a disorder where language does not develop as expected. This often affects vocabulary skills, i.e., finding the words to express wants, needs and ideas, which can influence behaviours linked…

Large language model (LLM) agents are constrained by limited context windows, necessitating external memory systems for long-term information understanding. Current memory-augmented agents typically depend on pre-defined instructions and…

The generation of lyrics tightly connected to accompanying melodies involves establishing a mapping between musical notes and syllables of lyrics. This process requires a deep understanding of music constraints and semantic patterns at…

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…

Self-supervised techniques for learning speech representations have been shown to develop linguistic competence from exposure to speech without the need for human labels. In order to fully realize the potential of these approaches and…

We propose spoken sentence embeddings which capture both acoustic and linguistic content. While existing works operate at the character, phoneme, or word level, our method learns long-term dependencies by modeling speech at the sentence…

Spoken language evolves constrained by the economy of speech, which depends on factors such as the structure of the human mouth. This gives rise to local phonetic correlations in spoken words. Here we demonstrate that these local…

A key desiderata for inclusive and accessible speech recognition technology is ensuring its robust performance to children's speech. Notably, this includes the rapidly advancing neural network based end-to-end speech recognition systems.…

Logographs (Chinese characters) have recursive structures (i.e. hierarchies of sub-units in logographs) that contain phonological and semantic information, as developmental psychology literature suggests that native speakers leverage on the…

While neural text-to-speech systems perform remarkably well in high-resource scenarios, they cannot be applied to the majority of the over 6,000 spoken languages in the world due to a lack of appropriate training data. In this work, we use…

Like speech, signs are composed of discrete, recombinable features called phonemes. Prior work shows that models which can recognize phonemes are better at sign recognition, motivating deeper exploration into strategies for modeling sign…

While speech recognition has seen a surge in interest and research over the last decade, most machine learning models for speech recognition either require large training datasets or lots of storage and memory. Combined with the prominence…

Dialogic learning fosters motivation and deeper understanding in education through purposeful and structured dialogues. Foundational models offer a transformative potential for child-robot interactions, enabling the design of personalized,…

LLM-powered embodied agents have shown success on conventional object-rearrangement tasks, but providing personalized assistance that leverages user-specific knowledge from past interactions presents new challenges. We investigate these…

Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…

Code-Switching refers to the phenomenon of switching languages within a sentence or discourse. However, limited code-switching , different language phoneme-sets and high rebuilding costs throw a challenge to make the specialized acoustic…

Reading comprehension presents a significant challenge for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), often requiring intensive one-on-one reading support. To assist therapists in scaling this support, we developed a…

In this paper, we discuss the generation of symbols (and alphabets) based on specific user requirements (medium, priorities, type of information that needs to be conveyed). A framework for the generation of alphabets is proposed, and its…