Konstanz prosodically annotated infant-directed speech corpus (KIDS corpus)

Zahner, Katharina; Schönhuber, Muna; Grijzenhout, Janet; Braun, Bettina

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2016-115

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…It is likely that adult speakers of both regions have accumulated enough experience with different pitch accents, which allowed them to form the respective three categories (cf. Zahner et al, 2016, showing that already children grow up in Southern Germany are exposed to the full German accent inventory from early on). Our data hence call for a three-way distinction between rising-falling contours for both regional varieties.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function

et al. 2022

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The intonational realization of utterances is generally characterized by regional as well as inter- and intra-speaker variability in f0. Category boundaries thus remain “fuzzy” and it is non-trivial how the (continuous) acoustic space maps onto (discrete) pitch accent categories. We focus on three types of rising-falling contours, which differ in the alignment of L(ow) and H(igh) tones with respect to the stressed syllable. Most of the intonational systems on German have described two rising accent categories, e.g., L+H* and L*+H in the German ToBI system. L+H* has a high-pitched stressed syllable and a low leading tone aligned in the pre-tonic syllable; L*+H a low-pitched stressed syllable and a high trailing tone in the post-tonic syllable. There are indications for the existence of a third category which lies between these two categories, with both L and H aligned within the stressed syllable, henceforth termed (LH)*. In the present paper, we empirically investigate the distinctiveness of three rising-falling contours [L+H*, (LH)*, and L*+H, all with a subsequent low boundary tone] in German wh-questions. We employ an approach that addresses both the form and the function of the contours, also taking regional variation into account. In Experiment 1 (form), we used a delayed imitation paradigm to test whether Northern and Southern German speakers can imitate the three rising-falling contours in wh-questions as distinct contours. In Experiment 2 (function), we used a free association task to investigate whether listeners interpret the pragmatic meaning of the three contours differently. Imitation results showed that German speakers—both from the North and the South—reproduced the three contours. There was a small but significant effect of regional variety such that contours produced by speakers from the North were slightly more distinct than those by speakers from the South. In the association task, listeners from both varieties attributed distinct meanings to the (LH)* accent as opposed to the two ToBI accents L+H* and L*+H. Combined evidence from form and function suggests that three distinct contours can be found in the acoustic and perceptual space of German rising-falling contours.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function

et al. 2022

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“…Samples of American English were parts of a multilanguage corpora collected for the purpose of examining aspects of universality of IDS across cultures and societies (Hilton et al, 2022 ). Samples of German were from the Konstanz Prosodically Annotated InfantDirected Speech (KIDS) Corpus (Zahner et al, 2016 ), collected from a semi- structured mother-infant play situation where mothers were given a picture book and some other toys, which they could use according to their infant's interest. Cantonese samples were from the dataset of a study examining functions of acoustic-phonetic modifications in IDS (Wang et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhythm May Be Key to Linking Language and Cognition in Young Infants: Evidence From Machine Learning

2022

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Rhythm is key to language acquisition. Across languages, rhythmic features highlight fundamental linguistic elements of the sound stream and structural relations among them. A sensitivity to rhythmic features, which begins in utero, is evident at birth. What is less clear is whether rhythm supports infants' earliest links between language and cognition. Prior evidence has documented that for infants as young as 3 and 4 months, listening to their native language (English) supports the core cognitive capacity of object categorization. This precocious link is initially part of a broader template: listening to a non-native language from the same rhythmic class as (e.g., German, but not Cantonese) and to vocalizations of non-human primates (e.g., lemur, Eulemur macaco flavifrons, but not birds e.g., zebra-finches, Taeniopygia guttata) provide English-acquiring infants the same cognitive advantage as does listening to their native language. Here, we implement a machine-learning (ML) approach to ask whether there are acoustic properties, available on the surface of these vocalizations, that permit infants' to identify which vocalizations are candidate links to cognition. We provided the model with a robust sample of vocalizations that, from the vantage point of English-acquiring 4-month-olds, either support object categorization (English, German, lemur vocalizations) or fail to do so (Cantonese, zebra-finch vocalizations). We assess (a) whether supervised ML classification models can distinguish those vocalizations that support cognition from those that do not, and (b) which class(es) of acoustic features (including rhythmic, spectral envelope, and pitch features) best support that classification. Our analysis reveals that principal components derived from rhythm-relevant acoustic features were among the most robust in supporting the classification. Classifications performed using temporal envelope components were also robust. These new findings provide in principle evidence that infants' earliest links between vocalizations and cognition may be subserved by their perceptual sensitivity to rhythmic and spectral elements available on the surface of these vocalizations, and that these may guide infants' identification of candidate links to cognition.

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“…The form of language adapted to communicating with children is referred to as child-directed speech , or CDS. CDS entails both syntactic considerations – of word use and grammatical construction (Cameron-Faulkner et al , 2003; Cristia, 2019) – and verbal or prosodic construction – the rhythm and pitch at which it is spoken (Biersack et al , 2005; Zahner, 2016). The study of CDS often aims to understand how we adapt our language in interactions with children and how the linguistic environment for children shapes their learning.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

How do the kids speak? Improving educational use of text mining with child-directed language models

Organisciak

Newman

Eby

et al. 2023

ILS

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Purpose Most educational assessments tend to be constructed in a close-ended format, which is easier to score consistently and more affordable. However, recent work has leveraged computation text methods from the information sciences to make open-ended measurement more effective and reliable for older students. The purpose of this study is to determine whether models used by computational text mining applications need to be adapted when used with samples of elementary-aged children. Design/methodology/approach This study introduces domain-adapted semantic models for child-specific text analysis, to allow better elementary-aged educational assessment. A corpus compiled from a multimodal mix of spoken and written child-directed sources is presented, used to train a children’s language model and evaluated against standard non-age-specific semantic models. Findings Child-oriented language is found to differ in vocabulary and word sense use from general English, while exhibiting lower gender and race biases. The model is evaluated in an educational application of divergent thinking measurement and shown to improve on generalized English models. Research limitations/implications The findings demonstrate the need for age-specific language models in the growing domain of automated divergent thinking and strongly encourage the same for other educational uses of computation text analysis by showing a measurable difference in the language of children. Social implications Understanding children’s language more representatively in automated educational assessment allows for more fair and equitable testing. Furthermore, child-specific language models have fewer gender and race biases. Originality/value Research in computational measurement of open-ended responses has thus far used models of language trained on general English sources or domain-specific sources such as textbooks. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to study age-specific language models for educational assessment. In addition, while there have been several targeted, high-quality corpora of child-created or child-directed speech, the corpus presented here is the first developed with the breadth and scale required for large-scale text modeling.

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Konstanz prosodically annotated infant-directed speech corpus (KIDS corpus)

Cited by 5 publications

References 27 publications

Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function

Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function

Rhythm May Be Key to Linking Language and Cognition in Young Infants: Evidence From Machine Learning

How do the kids speak? Improving educational use of text mining with child-directed language models

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