When learning language young children are faced with many 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 determining their lexical category. We performed a two-step an...

The purpose of this study was to identify preliminary acoustic and phonological characteristics of onomatopoetic expressions (OE) in Swedish child-directed speech. The materials on one mother interacting with her 4-year-old child were transcribed and used for pitch contour measurements on OE. Measurements were also made on some non-onomatopoetic expressions to be used as controls. The results s...

In this paper, we present a database with emotional children’s speech in a human-robot scenario: the children were giving instructions to Sony’s pet robot dog AIBO, with AIBO showing both obedient and disobedient behaviour. In such a scenario, a specific type of partner-centered interaction can be observed. We aimed at finding prosodic correlates of children’s emotional speech and were interest...

One of the characteristics of child-directed speech is its high degree of repetitiousness. Sequences of repetitious utterances with a constant intention, variation sets, have been shown to be correlated with children’s language acquisition. To obtain a baseline for the occurrences of variation sets in Swedish, we annotate 18 parent– child dyads using a generalised definition according to which ...

The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of acquisition of words have been proposed, little emphasis has been directed to the raw input children achieve. In this work we present a comparatively large-scale ...

This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Child Disgust Scale (CDS) among 457 youth (ages 8-17, M = 14.77 ± 1.98 years) initiating residential treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders. Confirmatory factor analysis supported a bifactor model with two distinct factors of Disgust Avoidance and Disgust Affect, in addition to an overall General Disgust factor. ...

words: 60 Text words: 967 References words: 450 Total words: 1477 The Neglected Universals: Learnability Constraints and Discourse Cues Heidi Waterfall Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA and Dept. of Psychology, University of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637, USA [email protected] Shimon Edelman Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA and Dept. ...

The input to a cognitively plausible model of language acquisition must have the same information components and statistical properties as the child-directed speech. There are collections of child-directed utterances (e.g., CHILDES), but a realistic representation of their visual and semantic context is not available. We propose three quantitative measures for analyzing the statistical properti...

Although previous studies have found a link between the quantity and quality of child-directed speech learners receive and their vocabulary development, no previous studies have found a parallel link between overheard speech measured at a very young age and vocabulary development (Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow, 2012; Shneidman, Arroyo, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2013; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). This...