This study investigates the child-directed speech (CDS) of four Russian-, six German, and six English-speaking mothers to their 2-year-old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word-order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the i...

This study examined potential differences in vocabulary found in picture books and adult’s speech to children and to other adults. Using a small sample of various sources of speech and print, Hayes observed that print had a more extensive vocabulary than speech. The current analyses of two different spoken language databases and an assembled picture book corpus replicated and extended these fin...

When acquiring language, young children may use acoustic spectro-temporal patterns in speech to derive phonological units in spoken language (e.g., prosodic stress patterns, syllables, phonemes). Children appear to learn acoustic-phonological mappings rapidly, without direct instruction, yet the underlying developmental mechanisms remain unclear. Across different languages, a relationship betwe...

Assessing whether domain-general mechanisms could account for language acquisition requires determining whether statistical regularities among surface cues in child directed speech (CDS) are sufficient for inducing deep syntactic and semantic structure. This paper reports a case study on the relation between pronoun usage in CDS, on the one hand, and broad verb classes, on the other. A corpus a...

PURPOSE To determine the extent to which behavioral and physiological responses during child-directed speech (CDS) correlate concurrently and predictively with communication skills in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). METHOD Twenty-two boys with ASD (initial mean age: 35 months) participated in a longitudinal study. At entry, behavioral (i.e., percentage looking) and physio...

Infant directed speech (IDS) is the special speech register used to talk to human infants. This paper provides an historical and theoretical background to the study of IDS and special speech registers, as an introduction to four papers which follow. These are concerned with Australian IDS [2], Thai IDS [3,4], and Australian pet directed speech (PDS) [5]. 1. Infant Directed Speech A Brief Histor...

Cross-linguistic studies on unsupervised word segmentation have consistently shown that English is easier to segment than other languages. In this paper, we propose an explanation of this finding based on the notion of segmentation ambiguity. We show that English has a very low segmentation ambiguity compared to Japanese and that this difference correlates with the segmentation performance in a...

We investigate the role of prosody in child-directed speech of three English speaking adults using data collected for the Human Speechome Project, an ecologically valid, longitudinal corpus collected from the home of a family with a young child. We looked at differences in prosody between child-directed and adult-directed speech. We also looked at the change in prosody of child-directed speech ...

We investigate the role of prosody in child-directed speech of three English speaking adults using data collected for the Human Speechome Project, an ecologically valid, longitudinal corpus collected from the home of a family with a young child. We looked at differences in prosody between child-directed and adult-directed speech. We also looked at the change in prosody of child-directed speech ...

Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children’s vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is about any differences the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens adult children (from caregiver–child transcriptions) same qu...