Introduction: In early typical language development, children understand words before they are able to use them in speech. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) generally show impairments in both the comprehension and the production of language. However, the relative degree of delay or impairment in each of these sub-domains may also be atypical and remains less well-understood. Materia...

In this paper, we propose a stochastic version of a general purpose functional programming language as a method of modeling stochastic processes. The language contains random choices, conditional statements, structured values, defined functions, and recursion. By imagining an experiment in which the program is “run” and the random choices made by sampling, we can interpret a program in this lan...

In this paper, we propose a stochastic version of a general purpose functional programming language as a method of modeling stochastic processes. The language contains random choices, conditional statements, structured values, defined functions, and recursion. By imagining an experiment in which the program is “run” and the random choices made by sampling, we can interpret a program in this lan...

In this study we demonstrate the importance of distributed sampling of peristimulus time in blocked design fMRI studies. Distributed sampling ensures all the components of an event-related hemodynamic response are sampled and avoids the bias incurred when stimulus presentation is time-locked to data acquisition. We found that differences in the temporal offset between stimulus presentation and ...

Spontaneous language samples elicited during freeplay and interview contexts were compared for 10 children who were specifically language impaired (SLI). Clinician-child videotaped interactions were analyzed for both structural and conversational behaviors. The results indicated that the interview was a reliable and valid assessment context, eliciting the same profile of behaviors as the freepl...

The combinatorial space of translation derivations in phrase-based statistical machine translation is given by the intersection between a translation lattice and a target language model. We replace this intractable intersection by a tractable relaxation which incorporates a low-order upperbound on the language model. Exact optimisation is achieved through a coarseto-fine strategy with connectio...

Children with Down syndrome (DS) have cognitive disabilities resulting from trisomy 21. Language-learning difficulties, especially expressive language problems, are an important component of the phenotype of this population. Many individuals with DS are born into bilingual environments. To date, however, there is almost no information available regarding the capacity of these individuals to acq...

We investigate machine learning techniques for coping with highly skewed class distributions in two spontaneous speech processing tasks. Both tasks, sentence boundary and disfluency detection, provide important structural information for downstream language processing modules. We examine the effect of data set size, task, sampling method (no sampling, downsampling, oversampling, and ensemble sa...