this study is an attempt to answer three questions: first, whether there is a difference between the grammatical competence de- velopment of a group of children aged 2;6 vs. a group of children aged 3;6. second, whether there is a relationship between the children’s age and their mlu on the one hand and their speech and the caretakers’ speech on the other. third, whether or not the normal limit...

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...

This study sought to determine why American parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds communicate in different ways with their children. Forty-seven parent-child dyads were videotaped engaging in naturalistic interactions in the home for ninety minutes at child age 2;6. Transcripts of these interactions provided measures of child-directed speech. Children's vocabulary comprehension skill...

The current study tested the ability of whines and child-directed speech to attract the attention of listeners involved in a story repetition task. Twenty non-parents and 17 parents were presented with two dull stories, each playing to a separate ear, and asked to repeat one of the stories verbatim. The story that participants were instructed to ignore was interrupted occasionally with the read...

This research investigated the role of child-directed speech in the acquisition of vowel systems in a cross-linguistic perspective. In order to determine if vocalic systems are expanded in child-directed speech and if this extension varies crosslinguistically, child-directed speech (CDS) was compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) in three rhythmically different languages: French, English and J...

Child-directed speech (CDS) is a talking style adopted by caregivers when they talk to toddlers (Snow, 1995). We consider the role of distributional semantic features of CDS in language acquisition. We view semantic structure as a manifold on which words lie. We compare the semantic structure of verbs in CDS to the semantic structure of child speech (CS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) by measu...