Related papers: Infrequent Child-Directed Speech Is Bursty and May…
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,…
Vocal responses from caregivers are believed to promote more frequent and more advanced infant vocalizations. However, studies that examine this relationship typically do not account for the fact that infant and adult vocalizations are…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of…
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…
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…
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…
Infant vocal babbling strongly relies on jaw oscillations, especially at the stage of canonical babbling, which underlies the syllabic structure of world languages. In this paper, we propose, model and analyze an hypothesis to explain this…
Infants, adults, non-human primates and non-primates all learn patterns implicitly, and they do so across modalities. The biological evidence supports the hypothesis that the mechanism for this learning is general but computationally local.…
Acoustic analyses of infant vocalizations are valuable for research on speech development as well as applications in sound classification. Previous studies have focused on measures of acoustic features based on theories of speech…
Infants face the difficult problem of segmenting continuous speech into words without the benefit of a fully developed lexicon. Several sources of information in speech might help infants solve this problem, including prosody, semantic…
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…
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…
A child's spoken ability continues to change until their adult age. Until 7-8yrs, their speech sound development and language structure evolve rapidly. This dynamic shift in their spoken communication skills and data privacy make it…
Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…