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' speech; and in the Snoring sub-challenge, four different types of snoring have to be classified. In this paper, we describe these sub-challenges, their conditions, and the baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt feature representations by end-to-end learning with convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and bag-of-audio-words for the first time in the challenge series.

No abstract

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.

No abstract

The importance of the language environment in influencing language outcomes is well known, but few studies have addressed the contextual factors that influence the amount of speech heard and vocalizations produced by a young child under naturalistic conditions. We analyze effects of type of activity engaged in by the child and time of day on quantitative measures of the language environment. We found effects of both activity and time of day. Structured activities generated the highest levels of adult language, but not necessarily the most child vocalizations. Home and daycare environments looked overall very similar on these measures, however there were important differences across the two environments with respect to the specific effects of activity and time of day.

A range of demographic variables influence how much speech young children hear. However, because studies have used vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique collection of existing naturalistic, day-long recordings from 61 homes across four North American cities to examine language input as a function of age, gender, and maternal education. We analyzed adult speech heard by 3- to 20-month-olds who wore audio recorders for an entire day. We annotated speaker gender and speech register (child-directed or adult-directed) for 10,861 utterances from female and male adults in these recordings. Examining age, gender, and maternal education collectively in this ecologically-valid dataset, we find several key results. First, the speaker gender imbalance in the input is striking: children heard 2–3× more speech from females than males. Second, children in higher-maternal-education homes heard more child-directed speech than those in lower-maternal education homes. Finally, our analyses revealed a previously unreported effect: the proportion of child-directed speech in the input increases with age, due to a decrease in adult-directed speech with age. This large-scale analysis is an important step forward in collectively examining demographic variables that influence early development, made possible by pooled, comparable, day-long recordings of children’s language environments. The audio recordings, annotations, and annotation software are readily available for re-use and re-analysis by other researchers.

A B S T R A C TThe current study examines the syntactic and prosodic characteristics of the maternal speech to two infants between six and ten months. Consistent with previous work, we find infant-directed speech to be characterized by generally short utterances, isolated words and phrases, and large numbers of questions, but longer utterances are also found. Prosodic information provides cues to grammatical units not only at utterance boundaries, but also at utterance-internal clause boundaries. Subject-verb phrase boundaries in questions also show reliable prosodic cues, although those of declaratives do not. Prosodic information may thus play an important role in providing preverbal infants with information about the grammatically relevant word groupings. Furthermore, questions may play an important role in infants' discovery of verb phrases in English.

Since the mid-20th century, scientists have observed unique features in speech, facial expression, and content directed to infants and toddlers in comparison to speech directed to adults. Whereas much research has studied the characteristics of so-called infant-directed speech and speculated about its significance for language learning, research directly testing these ideas has been more limited until recently. Studies now suggest that infant-directed speech (a) promotes infant attention to language, (b) fosters social interaction between infants and caregivers, and (c) informs infants about various aspects of their native language by heightening distinctions relative to the speech addressed to adults. New developments focusing on the social role of infant-directed conversational interactions highlight the importance of caregiver responsiveness to the infant. Building a communicative foundation even prior to the time language emerges is crucial for fostering language development.