The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of acquisition of words have been proposed, little emphasis has been directed to the raw input children achieve. In this work we present a comparatively large-scale ...

words: 60 Text words: 967 References words: 450 Total words: 1477 The Neglected Universals: Learnability Constraints and Discourse Cues Heidi Waterfall Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA and Dept. of Psychology, University of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637, USA [email protected] Shimon Edelman Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA and Dept. ...

The input to a cognitively plausible model of language acquisition must have the same information components and statistical properties as the child-directed speech. There are collections of child-directed utterances (e.g., CHILDES), but a realistic representation of their visual and semantic context is not available. We propose three quantitative measures for analyzing the statistical properti...

Although previous studies have found a link between the quantity and quality of child-directed speech learners receive and their vocabulary development, no previous studies have found a parallel link between overheard speech measured at a very young age and vocabulary development (Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow, 2012; Shneidman, Arroyo, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2013; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). This...

In this paper we analyze the relation between adults’ intonational categories as described in the ToBI framework and children’s intonation contours, using a parametric approach and cluster evaluation methods. In the field of prosody, an increasing number of studies on the development of intonation apply the intonational categories of adult speech described as a sequence of high (H) and low (L) ...