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Figuring out which objects or concepts words refer to is a central language learning challenge for young children. Most models of this process posit that children learn early object labels from co-occurrences of words and their referents…
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,…
Joint attention is a critical component of early speech-language development and a key indicator of effective parent-child interaction. However, research on detecting and analysing joint attention remains limited, particularly for…
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say \emph{historical}…
Earlier research has suggested that human infants might use statistical dependencies between speech and non-linguistic multimodal input to bootstrap their language learning before they know how to segment words from running speech. However,…
In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. Many accounts of this early phonetic learning exist, but computational models predicting the attunement patterns observed in…
While the study of language as typed on smartphones offers valuable insights, existing data collection methods often fall short in providing contextual information and ensuring user privacy. We present a privacy-respectful approach -…
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…
In this paper we explain how contextual expectations are generated and used in the task-oriented spoken language understanding system Dialogos. The hard task of recognizing spontaneous speech on the telephone may greatly benefit from the…
Current conversational AI systems aim to understand a set of pre-designed requests and execute related actions, which limits them to evolve naturally and adapt based on human interactions. Motivated by how children learn their first…
The integration of generative artificial intelligence into educational applications has enhanced personalized and interactive learning experiences, and it shows strong potential to promote young learners language acquisition. However, it is…
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…
Emotion education is critical for children aged 3 to 6. However, existing technologies largely focus on children's direct interaction with AI, overlooking the central role of parents in guiding early emotional development at home. To…
Response generation is one of the critical components in task-oriented dialog systems. Existing studies have shown that large pre-trained language models can be adapted to this task. The typical paradigm of adapting such extremely large…
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…
CHILDES is a paramount resource for language acquisition studies -- yet computational tools for analyzing its syntactic structure remain limited. Leveraging the recent release of the UD-English-CHILDES treebank with gold-standard Universal…
During their first years of life, infants learn the language(s) of their environment at an amazing speed despite large cross cultural variations in amount and complexity of the available language input. Understanding this simple fact still…
Grid displays are the most common form of augmentative and alternative communication device recommended by speech-language pathologists for children. Grid displays present a large variety of vocabulary which can be beneficial for a users'…
Diverse and extensive work has recently been conducted on text-conditioned human motion generation. However, progress in the reverse direction, motion captioning, has seen less comparable advancement. In this paper, we introduce a novel…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…