Gender agreement elicitation was used with Russian children to examine how diminutives common in Russian child-directed speech affect gender learning. Forty-six children (2;9-4;8) were shown pictures of familiar and of novel animals and asked to describe them after hearing their names, which all contained regular morphophonological cues to masculine or feminine gender. Half were presented as si...

Interval-based rhythm metrics were applied to the speech of English, Catalan and Spanish 2, 4 and 6 year-olds, and compared with the (adult-directed) speech of their mothers. Results reveal that child speech does not fall into a well-defined rhythmic class: for all three languages, it is more 'vocalic' (higher %V) than adult speech and has a tendency towards lower variability (when normalized f...

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...