In research on language development by bilingual children, the early language environment is commonly characterized in terms of the relative amount of exposure a child gets to each language based on parent report. Little is known about how absolute measures of child-directed speech in two languages relate to language growth. In this study of 3-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 18), tradi...

In this study we test a number of different claims about the nature of stylistic variation at the "single-word" stage by examining the relation between variation in early vocabulary composition, variation in early language use, and variation in the structural and functional propreties of mothers' child-directed speech. Maternal-report and observational data were collected for 26 children at 10,...

We introduce Incremental Semantic Analysis, a fully incremental word space model, and we test it on longitudinal child-directed speech data. On this task, ISA outperforms the related Random Indexing algorithm, as well as a SVD-based technique. In addition, the model has interesting properties that might also be characteristic of the semantic space of children.

We present a language-independent tool, called Varseta, for extracting variation sets in child-directed speech. This tool is evaluated against a gold standard corpus annotated with variation sets, MINGLE-3-VS, and used to explore variation sets in 26 languages1 in CHILDES-26-VS, a comparable corpus derived from the CHILDES database. The tool and the resources are freely available for research.2