Segmentability Differences Between Child-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech: A Systematic Test With an Ecologically Valid Corpus

Cristià, Alejandrina; Dupoux, Emmanuel; Ratner, Nan Bernstein; Söderström, Mélanie

doi:10.1162/opmi_a_00022

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Therefore, we adopt the Natural Language Processing/Speech Technology standard and use token recall and token precision (e.g., Ludusan, Versteegh, Jansen, Gravier, Cao, Johnson & Dupoux, 2014). This is also the approach adopted by previous work that attempts to compare the overall segmentability of different registers (childversus adult-directed speech, Cristia et al, 2019;Ludusan, Mazuka, Bernard, Cristia & Dupoux, 2017), and different languages (Caines, Altmann-Richer & Buttery, 2019;Loukatou, Stoll, Blasi & Cristia, 2018;Loukatou et al, 2019), or simply evaluate proposed algorithms (e.g., Daland & Pierrehumbert, 2011;Goldwater et al, 2009;Phillips & Pearl, 2014). These scores are calculated by comparing the output string, which contains hypothesized word breaks an algorithm supplies, against the original sentence containing word breaks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is there a bilingual disadvantage for word segmentation? A computational modeling approach

2021

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Since there are no systematic pauses delimiting words in speech, the problem of word segmentation is formidable even for monolingual infants. We use computational modeling to assess whether word segmentation is substantially harder in a bilingual than a monolingual setting. Seven algorithms representing different cognitive approaches to segmentation are applied to transcriptions of naturalistic input to young children, carefully processed to generate perfectly matched monolingual and bilingual corpora. We vary the overlap in phonology and lexicon experienced by modeling exposure to languages that are more similar (Catalan and Spanish) or more different (English and Spanish). We find that the greatest variation in performance is due to different segmentation algorithms and the second greatest to language, with bilingualism having effects that are smaller than both algorithm and language effects. Implications of these computational results for experimental and modeling approaches to language acquisition are discussed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is there a bilingual disadvantage for word segmentation? A computational modeling approach

2021

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“…There has been some computational work comparing learning from ADS and CDS at the level of word learning and phonetic learning. Studies on segmentability use algorithms that learn to identify word units, with some studies reporting higher segmentability for CDS (Batchelder, 2002;Daland and Pierrehumbert, 2011), while Cristia et al (2019) report mixed results. Kirchhoff and Schimmel (2005) train HMM-based speech recognition systems on CDS and ADS, and test on matched and crossed test sets.…”

Section: Related Work 21 Child Directed Speech and Learnabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to Understand Child-directed and Adult-directed Speech

Gelderloos

Chrupała

Alishahi

2020

Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Speech directed to children differs from adultdirected speech in linguistic aspects such as repetition, word choice, and sentence length, as well as in aspects of the speech signal itself, such as prosodic and phonemic variation. Human language acquisition research indicates that child-directed speech helps language learners. This study explores the effect of child-directed speech when learning to extract semantic information from speech directly. We compare the task performance of models trained on adult-directed speech (ADS) and child-directed speech (CDS). We find indications that CDS helps in the initial stages of learning, but eventually, models trained on ADS reach comparable task performance, and generalize better. The results suggest that this is at least partially due to linguistic rather than acoustic properties of the two registers, as we see the same pattern when looking at models trained on acoustically comparable synthetic speech.

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“…Interaction between children and more advanced language interlocutors (such as caregivers) plays an important role in many theories and studies on human language acquisition (e.g., Bruner, 1985;Clark, 2018). For example, although culturally dependent (Shneidman and Goldin-Meadow, 2012) and with the precise effects still up for discussion (Cristia et al, 2019), caregivers can communicate with their children in Child Directed Speech. In turn, children can for example experiment with the meaning of words, to illicit a response from their caregivers (Gillis and Schaerlaekens, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Interactive Language Modeling

Hoeve¹,

Kharitonov²,

Hupkes³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Interaction between caregivers and children plays a critical role in human language acquisition and development. Given this observation, it is remarkable that explicit interaction plays little to no role in artificial language modeling-which also targets the acquisition of human language, yet by artificial models. Moreover, an interactive approach to language modeling has the potential to make language models substantially more versatile and to considerably impact downstream applications. Motivated by these considerations, we pioneer the space of interactive language modeling. As a first contribution we present a road map in which we detail the steps that need to be taken towards interactive language modeling. We then lead by example and take the first steps on this road map, showing the initial feasibility of our approach. As such, this work aims to be the start of a larger research agenda on interactive language modeling.

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Segmentability Differences Between Child-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech: A Systematic Test With an Ecologically Valid Corpus

Cited by 14 publications

References 33 publications

Is there a bilingual disadvantage for word segmentation? A computational modeling approach

Is there a bilingual disadvantage for word segmentation? A computational modeling approach

Learning to Understand Child-directed and Adult-directed Speech

Towards Interactive Language Modeling

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