In this study we use a computational model of language learning called model of syntax acquisition in children (MOSAIC) to investigate the extent to which the optional infinitive (OI) phenomenon in Dutch and English can be explained in terms of a resource-limited distributional analysis of Dutch and English child-directed speech. The results show that the same version of MOSAIC is able to simul...

It has long been recognized that there is a natural dependence between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition, with the idea that the right knowledge representation enables acquisition to happen as reliably as it does. Given this, a reasonable criterion for a theory of knowledge representation is that it be useful for acquisition, particularly in non-trivial ...

In this study we use a computational model of language learning (MOSAIC) to investigate the extent to which the Optional Infinitive (OI) phenomenon in Dutch and English can be explained in terms of a resource-limited distributional analysis of Dutch and English child-directed speech. The results show that the same version of MOSAIC is able to simulate changes in the pattern of finiteness markin...

The major goal of this study was to investigate which phonetic strategies we may actually use when speaking to L2 speakers of our mother tongue (L1). The results showed that speech rate in general was slower and that the vowel formants were closer to target values, in L2 directed speech compared to L1 directed speech in Norwegian. These properties of L2 directed speech correspond to previous fi...

The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Addressee sub-challenge, it has to be determined whether speech produced by an adult is directed towards another adult or towards a child; in the Cold sub-challenge, speech under cold has to be told apart from ‘healthy’ ...

How spoken language is acquired has been an active area of inquiry in linguistic, psychological, and speech science. New advances in this controversial field are promising given the recent accumulation of large databases of children’s speech understanding and production, as well as various properties of words. This paper explores the contribution of a variety of potential influences on vocabula...

How spoken language is acquired has been an active area of inquiry in linguistic, psychological, and speech science. New advances in this controversial field are promising given the recent accumulation of large databases of children’s speech understanding and production, as well as various properties of words. This paper explores the contribution of a variety of potential influences on vocabula...

The quality of speech directed towards infants may play an important role in infants’ language development. However, few studies have examined the link between the two. We examined the correlation between maternal speech clarity and infant speech perception performance in two groups of Mandarin-speaking mother–infant pairs. Maternal speech clarity was assessed using the degree of expansion of t...

Previous studies have shown that infant-directed speech ('motherese') exhibits overemphasized acoustic properties which may facilitate the acquisition of phonetic categories by infant learners. It has been suggested that the use of infant-directed data for training automatic speech recognition systems might also enhance the automatic learning and discrimination of phonetic categories. This stud...