The main goal of this full-day workshop is to bring together researchers from several distinct fields: behavioral psychologists studying language acquisition, speech technology researchers, linguists, and computational modelers of cognitive development.
(book review of Ani Patel’s Music, Language, and the Brain)
Do biases in infant and adult language learning follow (or better yet, follow from) typological biases observed cross-linguistically? The evidence obtained thus far has been equivocal; the present study examines a previously uninvestigated type of bias...
Infants demonstrate comprehension of early nouns (e.g. “hand”) around six months, and comprehension of early non-nouns (e.g. “eat”) around 10 months. In two experiments, we explore the reasons for this lag. Expt. 1 is a gaze-following study, the results...
Several of the central questions in language, social cognition, and developmental research focus on the roles of input, output, and interaction on learning and communication. While it has become easy to collect long-form recordings, getting useful data...
Automatic speech recognition is more and more widely and effectively used. Nevertheless, in some automatic speech analysis tasks the state of the art is surprisingly poor. One of these is “diarization", the task of determining who spoke when. Diarization...
During lexical access, listeners turn unfolding phonetic input into words. We tested how participants interpret words that aren’t in their lexicon, either due to their coarticulation cues or because they label a novel object. In a 2-picture Visual World...
How do adults understand children’s speech? Children’s productions over the course of language development often bear little resemblance to typical adult pronunciations, yet caregivers nonetheless reliably recover meaning from them. Here, we employ a...
We investigate the development of children’s early grammatical knowledge using the test case of the English regular plural. Previous research points to early generalization, with children applying an abstract morphological rule to produce novel plurals...
Previous research has suggested that first-born infants acquire words faster than their later-born peers (Berglund et al., 2005), but may have some disadvantages in other aspects of syntactic and socio-communicative development (e.g. Hoff, 2006). Here we...
HomeBank is a new component of the TalkBank system, focused on long-form (i.e., multi-hour, typically daylong) real-world recordings of children’s language experiences, and it is linked to a GitHub repository in which tools for analyzing those recordings...
A key aspect of the development of speech production, the emergence of vocalizations that combine consonants and vowels, is captured by a measure called canonical proportion (CP). Yet this measure has mainly been studied among children under 12 months old...
