Recent advances in modeling early language acquisition are due not only to the development of machine-learning techniques, but also to the increasing availability of data on child language and child-adult interaction. In the absence of recordings of child-directed speech, or when models explicitly require such a representation for training data, phonemic transcriptions are commonly used as inpu...

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, existing models of sentence processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence internally. Here we analyze a video corpus of child-caregiver interactions with the aim of characterizing how discourse structure is reflected in child-directed speech and in children’s and caregivers’ behavior. We use topic c...

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 ...