Abstract Parents often use partial self-repetitions with variation in successive utterances (e.g., Want to get your ball? Get Do you want ball?). Such ‘variation sets’ contain latent distributional information about the building blocks of language and are predictive children's lexical grammatical structures. Because these properties parents atypically developing children virtually unknown, we c...

In child-directed speech (CDS), adults often use utterances with very few words; many include short, frequently used sentence frames, while others consist of a single word in isolation. Do such features of CDS provide perceptual advantages for the child? Based on descriptive analyses of parental speech, some researchers argue that isolated words should help infants in word recognition by facili...

Proper data selection for training a speech recognizer can be important for reducing costs of developing systems on new tasks and exploratory experiments, but it is also useful for efficient leveraging of the increasingly large speech resources available for training large vocabulary systems. In this work, we investigate various sampling methods, comparing the likelihood criterion to new acoust...

When learning language, young children are faced with many seemingly formidable challenges, including discovering words embedded in a continuous stream of sounds and determining what role these words play in syntactic constructions. We suggest that knowledge of phoneme distributions may play a crucial part in helping children segment words and determine their lexical category, and we propose an...

Frequency can often predict when children will acquire units of language such as words or phones. An additional predictor of speech development may be a phone’s functional load (FL), or the contrastive work that a sound performs in a language. A higher FL may correlate with earlier phone emergence in child speech as children selectively converge upon highly meaningful contrasts in their input. ...

This paper investigates the acquisition of prosodic words in European Portuguese (EP) through analysis of grammatical and statistical properties of the target language and child speech. The analysis of grammatical properties shows that there are solid cues to the prosodic word (PW) in EP, and the presence of early word-based phonology in child speech shows that EP children are aware of these cu...

conclusions the results suggested that pa skills in children with phonological disorders are affected by error type. we also found the type of errors that can play a more effective role in pa investigations as compared to pcc. the results also showed that children with cap require special attention. results the cap group showed significant difference with the nd group in alliteration (p = 0.001...

Empirical data regarding the syntactic complexity of children’s speech is important for theories of language acquisition. Currently much of this data is absent in the annotated versions of the CHILDES database. In this perliminary study, we show that a state-ofthe-art subcategorization acquisition system of Preiss et al. (2007) can be used to extract largescale subcategorization (frequency) inf...