In this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating co-occurrence data. We exemplify the implementation o...

We analyse the behaviour of Incremental Model-Based Clustering on child-directed speech data, and suggest a possible use of this method to describe the acquisition of phonetic classes by an infant. The effects of two factors are analysed, namely the number of coefficients describing the speech signal, and the frame length of the incremental clustering procedure. The results show that, although ...

Whether the input available to children is sufficient to explain their ability to use language has been the subject of much theoretical debate in cognitive science. Here, we present a simple, developmentally motivated computational model that learns to comprehend and produce language when exposed to child-directed speech. The model uses backward transitional probabilities to create an inventory...

Unsupervised parsing is a difficult task that infants readily perform. Progress has been made on this task using text-based models, but few computational approaches have considered how infants might benefit from acoustic cues. This paper explores the hypothesis that word duration can help with learning syntax. We describe how duration information can be incorporated into an unsupervised Bayesia...

Feature distinctiveness is a measure representing the uniqueness of objects’ features. Previous research found links between noun feature distinctiveness and age of acquisition (i.e. nouns referring to objects with relatively unique features are learned earlier). The present work investigates the links between feature distinctiveness and age of acquisition in verbs. Using high-dimensional vecto...

We report a quantitative analysis of the cross-utterance coordination observed in child-directed language, where successive utterances often overlap in a manner that makes their constituent structure more prominent, and describe the application of a recently published unsupervised algorithm for grammar induction to the largest available corpus of such language, producing a grammar capable of ac...

Johannessen, Janne Bondi. 2016. Prescriptive infinitives in the modern North Germanic languages: An ancient phenomenon in child-directed speech. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 39(3), 231–276. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commerci...

Children learn the meaning of words by being exposed to perceptually rich situations (linguistic discourse, visual scenes, etc). Current computational learning models typically simulate these rich situations through impoverished symbolic approximations. In this work, we present a distributed word learning model that operates on child-directed speech paired with realistic visual scenes. The mode...