Reading to young, pre-literate children is associated with better language and reading outcomes, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. The goal of this work is to better understand the potential mechanisms. We hypothesized that vocabulary diversity and sentence complexity might vary between picture books and child-directed speech, and we wanted to quantify those potential differe...

The aim of the study was to investigate different factors that affect the level of patient's general satisfaction with maxillary and mandibular complete dentures (CDs) using a multivariate analysis. A total of 100 CD wearers participated in this study. There were 46 men (37-77 years old; mean age 62.6 +/- 9.2) and 54 women (34-77 years old; mean age 60.9 +/- 9.3). In the questionnaire the patie...

This special issue showcases recent work on the computational modeling of child language acquisition. Together, these nine papers provide testimony to the scientific value of corpus-driven computational modeling. Each of the papers presents a clear, mechanistic model that can be tested, refined or rejected on the basis of publicly available data and/or replicable experiments. However, for many ...

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence-internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provid...

Most work on language acquisition treats word segmentation—the identification of linguistic segments from continuous speech— and word learning—the mapping of those segments to meanings—as separate problems. These two abilities develop in parallel, however, raising the question of whether they might interact. To explore the question, we present a new Bayesian segmentation model that incorporates...

This paper investigates the dynamics of childdirected speech in longitudinal data from the CHILDES corpus. We quantify the complexity of the speech used by each dialogue participant using simple measures. Our results show that there is a strong correlation in all measures between the complexity of the child’s and the mother’s utterances, indicating that adults adapt their speech at different le...

Adult-to-child interactions are often characterized by prosodically-exaggerated speech accompanied by visually captivating co-speech gestures. In a series of adult studies, we have shown that these gestures are linked in a sophisticated manner to the prosodic structure of adults' utterances. In the current study, we use the Preferential Looking Paradigm to demonstrate that two-year-olds can use...

Children can use the characteristic entailment patterns of verb classes to learn new verbs (Naigles, 1996), but how do they acquire verb classes? One possibility is that surface features that reflect argument structure can separate verb classes (Merlo & Stevenson, 2001). We tested this hypothesis by running clustering analyses on surface features of 29 verbs extracted from a large corpus of chi...

The child directed speech of twelve English-speaking mothers was analyzed in terms of utterance-level constructions. First, the mothers’ utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh-questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers’ utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item-ba...

AIMS To assess the effectiveness of alcohol documentation, examining medical correspondence and medical files of patients referred to the State Child Development Service (SCDS) and (ii) To measure the knowledge, attitudes and clinical practice of health practitioners working at the child development service (CDS) in relation to asking about alcohol use in pregnancy. METHODS Written documentat...