It has been shown that articulation rate (AR), the number of produced linguistic units per time unit with pauses excluded, is lower in child-directed speech (CDS) than in adult-directed speech (ADS). The present study is the first corpus-based longitudinal study to investigate AR in Swedish CDS as a function of child age while also controlling for utterance length in terms of number of syllable...

Forced alignment would enable phonetic analyses of child directed speech (CDS) corpora which have existing transcriptions. But existing alignment systems are inaccurate due to the atypical phonetics of CDS. We adapt a Kaldi forced alignment system to CDS by extending the dictionary and providing it with heuristically-derived hints for vowel locations. Using this system, we present a new time-al...

Repetitions in child-directed speech (CDS) have been shown to vary over time, and are suggested to affect first language acquisition. Correlations between verbal contents of repetitions in CDS and children’s language development have been suggested. The verbal contents of repetitions in Swedish CDS have not yet been investigated. The aim of this study was to examine the verbal contents of repet...

Prenatal experience with infant- and child-directed speech (IDS/CDS) may affect newborns' speech perception. We examined this possibility using an existing neonatal database from a recent cross-language study (Moon, Lagercrantz, & Kuhl, 2011). Seventy-three American and Swedish neonates (Mage = 32.58 hr, SD = 13.58 hr) were retrospectively coded as either having High (n = 32) or Low (n = 41) pr...

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...

One of the most timeless and universal activities, in which human beings across cultures participate, is speaking to children. This study investigated the differences between child-directed speech (CDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU), number of utterances, number of different words (NDW), and total number of words (TNW). In addition to examining th...

In child-directed speech (CDS), adults often use utterances with very few words; many include short, frequently used sentence frames, while others consist of a single word in isolation. Do such features of CDS provide perceptual advantages for the child? Based on descriptive analyses of parental speech, some researchers argue that isolated words should help infants in word recognition by facili...

This study analyses variation sets in a sample of child-directed speech (CDS) Turkish terms their structure and effect on child speech. The term “variation set” was first introduced to describe the sequences repetitions, which intention behind expressions stays same throughout whole conversation while form shows constant variation. occurs various ways such as lexical substitution, rephrasing so...

It has been widely documented that child-directed speech (CDS) may differ notably from adult-directed speech in terms of prosody (e.g. [1] [2] [3] [4]). Common features include higher and greater range of pitch, especially in stressed syllables; longer duration of individual words, more prominent final lengthening, slower speech rate, higher amplitude, shorter utterances and longer pauses, more...

Young children who hear more child-directed speech (CDS) tend to have larger vocabularies later in childhood, but the specific characteristics of CDS underlying this link are currently underspecified. The present study sought to elucidate how the structure of language input boosts learning by investigating whether repetition of object labels in successive sentences-a common feature of natural C...