Children's Spontaneous Speech Research Articles

Children's Early Spontaneous Comparisons Predict Later Analogical Reasoning Skills: An Investigation of Parental Influence.

Laboratory studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of making comparisons on children's analogical reasoning skills. We extend this finding to an observational dataset comprising 42 children. The prevalence of specific comparisons, which identify a feature of similarity or difference, in children's spontaneous speech from 14-58 months is associated with higher scores in tests of verbal and non-verbal analogy in 6th grade. We test two pre-registered hypotheses about how parents influence children's production of specific comparisons: 1) via modelling, where parents produce specific comparisons during the sessions prior to child onset of this behaviour; 2) via responsiveness, where parents respond to their children's earliest specific comparisons in variably engaged ways. We do not find that parent modelling or responsiveness predicts children's production of specific comparisons. However, one of our pre-registered control analyses suggests that parents' global comparisons-comparisons that do not identify a specific feature of similarity or difference-may bootstrap children's later production of specific comparisons, controlling for parent IQ. We present exploratory analyses following up on this finding and suggest avenues for future confirmatory research. The results illuminate a potential route by which parents' behaviour may influence children's early spontaneous comparisons and potentially their later analogical reasoning skills.

The role of the input frequency in L1 Spanish phonological acquisition. A corpus-based study

This study presents the phonological system exhibited by children (n=59) aged 3;0 to 6;0 and focuses on the role of input frequency. Using a spontaneous child speech corpus of Spanish (CHIEDE) as a data source, as well as computational processing techniques -including an automatic phonological transcriber-, data relating to the phonological level was retrieved. This resulted in a phonological inventory of Spanish-speaking children, ordered by frequency of use, which may serve as a model for research on typical and atypical child language development. Additionally, a study was carried out on the stability of the participants’ phonological systems by calculating the variability that the different age groups displayed, and outcomes were compared with other similar corpora. Results obtained from the comparison of the phonological inventory of children and adults show that there is a relationship between frequency of use in adult speech and the order of acquisition of phonemes.

Bye-Bye Bunny: Place and Manner Sequences in Children's C1VC2V-Shaped Words.

Place and manner of articulation in American English-learning children's salient consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (C1VC2V) target words (e.g., baby, bunny, and cookie) were compared with their actual productions of these words. We hypothesized that target words with repeated place and/or manner characteristics in C1VC2V consonant sequences would be matched in children's actual productions more frequently than target words with variegated place and manner sequences. This hypothesis was based on a proposal that children use available production system capacities to produce salient word forms derived from perceptual input on those word forms. Place and manner sequences were analyzed in 2,092 tokens of C1VC2V target words produced by 18 typically developing children in the single-word period. All data were from these children's spontaneous functional speech in a familiar speaking context. Both target word forms and actual child productions of those targets were analyzed. Results indicated that C1VC2V word target sequences predominantly consisted of repetitions in both place and manner of articulation (e.g., labial-labial, stop-stop). Targets with repetitions of consonant sequences were matched more frequently than targets with variegated sequences for both place and manner (e.g., labial-coronal, stop-nasal) in these children's actual productions. Results also indicated that C1VC2V target words beginning with a labial consonant (e.g., baby, bunny, and piggy) were matched in children's actual productions more frequently than words with coronal or dorsal consonant onsets (e.g., daddy and cookie). In C1VC2V word forms, occurring in early output, children's actual productions matched their target word sequences when the words consisted of repeated sequences in both place and manner. These results suggest that salient target words with repeated sequences may help children support increases in their repertoire of meaningful vocalizations during the transition from babbling to meaningful speech.

Acquisition of demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective.

This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., that, there) from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates the emergence and development of demonstratives in three European (English, French, Spanish) and four non-European languages (Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian) between age 1;0 and 6;0. The data show that, across languages, demonstratives are among the earliest and most frequent child words, but their frequency decreases with age and MLU. As children grow older, they tend to use other types of referring terms (e.g., anaphoric pronouns) and other types of spatial expressions (e.g., adpositions). Considering these results, we hypothesize that children shift from using a body-oriented strategy of deictic communication to more abstract and disembodied strategies of encoding reference and space during the preschool years.

Advancing towards automatic speech recognition of children innaturalistic preschool environment

The preschool classroom is a viable space for capturing young children’s interactions with teachers. Developing speech/language assessment tools will offer a non-invasive way to quantify child-teacher interactions, allowing teachers to make changes as needed and better support children’s speech, language, and cognitive skills. Building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for child speech has been challenging, since most studies have been conducted: (1) with older children, (2) in clean and controlled settings, and (3) generally are limited to prompted or read stimuli. To date, limited research has focused on developing ASR systems for spontaneous child speech in preschool settings. For our study, spontaneous child-teacher conversations were captured in preschool classrooms using the LENA digital audio recorder. A 25-h corpus of child speech were used for experiments using an open-source ASR toolkit. Major challenges in this data for developing ASR models include noisy background environments, age and diversity of children. Our effort focuses on alternative time-delay neural networks (TDNN) for acoustic modelling to improve ASR, as well as trade-offs in language model development and lexicon/vocabulary partitioning. Results from this study across acoustic and language models will be presented using child preschool classroom data. [Work sponsored by NSF CyberLearning Grant #1918032.]

A parametric approach to the acquisition of syntax.

Three case-studies, using longitudinal records of children's spontaneous speech, illustrate what happens when a child's syntax changes. The first, examining acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining acquisition of prepositional questions in English or Spanish, shows that children (i) may go as long as 9 months producing both direct-object questions and declaratives with prepositional phrases, before first attempting a prepositional question; and (ii) at some point, abrubtly begin producing prepositional questions that are correctly formed for the target language. The third case study shows that in children acquiring English, the onset of verb-particle constructions occurs almost exactly when that child begins using novel noun-noun compounds. After a discussion of the implications for the nature of syntactic knowledge, and for the mechanisms by which it is acquired, two examples are presented of as-yet untested acquisitional predictions of parametric proposals in the syntax literature.

Leveraging Linguistic Context in Dyadic Interactions to Improve Automatic Speech Recognition for Children

Automatic speech recognition for child speech has been long considered a more challenging problem than for adult speech. Various contributing factors have been identified such as larger acoustic speech variability including mispronunciations due to continuing biological changes in growth, developing vocabulary and linguistic skills, and scarcity of training corpora. A further challenge arises when dealing with spontaneous speech of children involved in a conversational interaction, and especially when the child may have limited or impaired communication ability. This includes health applications, one of the motivating domains of this paper, that involve goal-oriented dyadic interactions between a child and clinician/adult social partner as a part of behavioral assessment. In this work, we use linguistic context information from the interaction to adapt speech recognition models for children speech. Specifically, spoken language from the interacting adult speech provides the context for the child’s speech. We propose two methods to exploit this context: lexical repetitions and semantic response generation. For the latter, we make use of sequence-to-sequence models that learn to predict the target child utterance given context adult utterances. Long-term context is incorporated in the model by propagating the cell-state across the duration of conversation. We use interpolation techniques to adapt language models at the utterance level, and analyze the effect of length and direction of context (forward and backward). Two different domains are used in our experiments to demonstrate the generalized nature of our methods - interactions between a child with ASD and an adult social partner in a play-based, naturalistic setting, and in forensic interviews between a child and a trained interviewer. In both cases, context-adapted models yield significant improvement (upto 10.71% in absolute word error rate) over the baseline and perform consistently across context windows and directions. Using statistical analysis, we investigate the effect of source-based (adult) and target-based (child) factors on adaptation methods. Our results demonstrate the applicability of our modeling approach in improving child speech recognition by employing information transfer from the adult interlocutor.

Ratunku! or Just Tunku! Evidence for the Reliability and Concurrent Validity of the Language Use Inventory-Polish.

Purpose To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Polish-speaking children. This study aimed to adapt to Polish a standardized parent report measure, the Language Use Inventory (LUI; O'Neill, 2009, in order to enable cross-cultural comparisons and to use the LUI-Polish to screen for pragmatic development in children 18-47 months of age. We concentrated on the sociocultural and functional adaptation of LUI and aimed to demonstrate its reliability, developmental sensitivity, and concurrent validity. Method Parents completed an online version of LUI-Polish, longitudinally at 3 time points (when the child was 20, 32, and 44 months old). In addition, parents completed the Polish adaptations of the Questionnaire for Communication and Early Language at 22 months and the Language Development Survey at 24 months. Children's spontaneous speech was assessed at 24 months, and their expressive and receptive vocabulary was assessed at 36 months. Results All 3 parts of the LUI-Polish (Gestures, Words, and Sentences) showed very good levels of internal consistency at each time point. Significant correlations were observed between all parts of the LUI-Polish at all 3 measurement time points. The expected developmental trajectory was observed for boys and girls providing evidence of its developmental sensitivity for children between the ages of 2 and 4 years: an increase with age in the total score (due to an increase in Words and Sentences) and a decrease in Gestures. Supporting concurrent validity, significant correlations were found between children's performance on (a) the LUI-Polish at 20 months and the Questionnaire for Communication and Early Language at 22 months as well as the Language Development Survey and spontaneous speech measures at 24 months and (b) the LUI-Polish at 32 months and the 2 measures of vocabulary comprehension and production at 36 months. Conclusion The Polish adaptation of the LUI demonstrated good psychometric properties that provide a sound basis for cross-cultural comparisons and further research toward norming of the LUI-Polish. Moreover, the expected developmental trajectory in the pragmatic development of Polish children was observed.

Experiential Measures Can Be Used as a Proxy for Language Dominance in Bilingual Language Acquisition Research.

Language dominance is a multidimensional construct comprising several distinct yet interrelated components, including language proficiency, exposure and use. The exact relation between these components remains unclear. Several studies have observed a (non-linear) relationship between bilingual children’s amount of exposure and absolute proficiency in each language, but our understanding of the relationship between language exposure and use and relative proficiency is limited. To address this question, we examined whether experiential-based measures of language dominance, operationalised here in the narrow sense of relative language proficiency, can provide an efficient alternative to the more labor-intensive performance-based measures often used in the literature. In earlier work, Unsworth (a) examined the relationship between relative proficiency and language exposure and use in a group of English–Dutch bilingual preschool children residing in the Netherlands. This study expands these findings by examining Dutch–English preschool children of the same age residing in the United Kingdom in order to cover the full dominance continuum. Participants were 35 simultaneous bilingual children (2;0–5;0) exposed to English and Dutch, 20 resident in the Netherlands and 15 in the United Kingdom. Relative amount of language exposure and use were estimated using a parental questionnaire. To obtain performance-based measures of language proficiency, children’s spontaneous speech was recorded during a half-hour play session in each language. The transcribed data were used to derive MLU (words), average length of the longest five utterances, the number of different verb and noun types. Single word vocabulary comprehension was assessed using standardized tests in both languages. Following Yip and Matthews (2006), relative proficiency was operationalised using differentials. In line with Unsworth (2016a), English-dominant children typically had less than approx. 35% exposure to Dutch and used Dutch less than approximately 30% of the time. Curve-fitting analyses revealed that non-linear models best fit the data. Logistic regression analyses showed that both exposure and use were good predictors of dominance group membership assigned using the same approach as Unsworth (2016a), that is, using SDs. Dominance groups derived independently using cluster analyses overlapped with the groups derived using SDs, confirming that relative amount of exposure and use can be used as a proxy for language dominance.

Input Subject Diversity Accelerates the Growth of Tense and Agreement: Indirect Benefits From a Parent-Implemented Intervention.

This follow-up study examined whether a parent intervention that increased the diversity of lexical noun phrase subjects in parent input and accelerated children's sentence diversity (Hadley et al., 2017) had indirect benefits on tense/agreement (T/A) morphemes in parent input and children's spontaneous speech. Differences in input variables related to T/A marking were compared for parents who received toy talk instruction and a quasi-control group: input informativeness and full is declaratives. Language growth on tense agreement productivity (TAP) was modeled for 38 children from language samples obtained at 21, 24, 27, and 30 months. Parent input properties following instruction and children's growth in lexical diversity and sentence diversity were examined as predictors of TAP growth. Instruction increased parent use of full is declaratives (ηp2 ≥ .25) but not input informativeness. Children's sentence diversity was also a significant time-varying predictor of TAP growth. Two input variables, lexical noun phrase subject diversity and full is declaratives, were also significant predictors, even after controlling for children's sentence diversity. These findings establish a link between children's sentence diversity and the development of T/A morphemes and provide evidence about characteristics of input that facilitate growth in this grammatical system.

CHILDREN'S QUESTION AS A FORM OF LINGUISTIC CREATIVE THINKING

The subject of the article is the specificity of metalinguistic reflection in children's speech. The article analyzes the linguocreativе nature of children's questions, particularly broadcasting the image of the world of the child and the nature of the processing of linguistic information in the light of cognitions formed. Metalinguistic reflection is characterized as one of the naturally evolving strategies of language acquisition in ontogeny, showing the analytical instinct and cognitive activity of the child. The purpose of the research is to identify unique children's innovations related to the reflection of their form and content, in terms of the associative and functional content. The main method is discourse analysis of metalinguistic statements recorded in the spontaneous speech of children in the form of a question. Particular emphasis is laid upon the interdependence of compensatory and deliberate creativity of the child, exhibiting the ability to make a conscious violation of the language of the canon. Metalinguistic component of children's issues provides an opportunity to assess the child's creativity, speech acts in terms of fluency, flexibility, originality. Children's questions are classified into those regarding the logic of things and the logic of language nomination, their correlation is established. This analysis reveals the following features of metalinguistic reflection in the formation of the language person: 1) development of linguistic abilities in "reading" motivational word forms and application of derived algorithms in creative word activity; 2) the expression of a child's uniqueness in the perception of aspects of the world and the language of processed information; 3) modeling function in the formation of dynamic subsystems child's speech, allowing the child to realize their nominative and communicative needs.

The Effect of Forest Play Experience Programs that utilize Natural Objects for Spontaneous Speech of Developmentally Delayed Children

Purpose: Language is one of the essential skills for promoting communication capacity and social adjustment behavior. Children with development delay, however, are insufficient in communicating spontaneously with others. It can be necessary to facilitate to pontaneously express their intention for establishing the basis of the social communication. This study was to investigate the effect of spontaneous speech on forest plays experience programs for developmental delays. Method: The experimental design was a multiple probe baseline across subject designs. Experimental conditions at baseline, interventions, and generalization and maintenance phases were performed. Results: First, the ecological experience program increased the frequency of spontaneous speech of all three participants. Second, the increased frequency of spontaneous speech of all three participants were generalized and maintained after withdrawal of the intervention. Conclusion: The ecological experience program using natural objects showed a positive effect on the frequency of spontaneous speech of children with developmental delays. Therefore, this kind of activity can be a presented as a effective strategy for developing the frequency of their spontaneity.

Input frequency and the acquisition of syllable structure in Polish

ABSTRACTThis article examines phonological development and its relationship to input statistics. Using novel data from a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous child speech in Polish, we evaluate and compare the predictions of a variety of input-based phonotactic models for syllable structure acquisition. We find that many commonly examined input statistics can make dramatically different predictions, as do different assumptions about the representational units over which statistics are calculated. We find that development is sensitive to multiple abstract units of phonological representation, supporting a crucial role for feature-based generalization. We also identify departures between the predictions of the best phonotactic models and children’s production patterns that indicate that input sensitivity alone cannot fully explain the developmental patterns. We discuss the role of universal markedness and phonetic difficulty and argue that a full explanation requires reference to these biases.

Acquisition of adjectival degree markers by Dutch- and Russian-speaking children

Prior research shows that morphological richness facilitates acquisition and that paradigm size is more important than uniqueness of form-function pairings (uniformity). The present paper takes a novel approach to uniformity, not restricted to inflectional morphology, and aims to establish whether morphological richness is more important than uniformity when competing forms from different linguistic levels are taken into account. To this end, the paper compares the acquisition of adjectival degree markers in Dutch and Russian. Dutch has scarce adjectival (degree) morphology, but more one-to-one form-function mappings, whereas the Russian system involves rich morphology, but little uniformity. A longitudinal study of spontaneous child speech and a cross-sectional elicitation experiment provide converging evidence that Russian children have more difficulty acquiring degree markers: their acquisition rate is lower and error rate higher. It is concluded that uniformity is more important than morphological richness, when cross-categorical cue competition (beyond inflectional morphology) is taken into account.

말소리장애 아동의 단어와 자발화 문맥의 음운오류패턴 비교

말소리장애 아동의 단어와 자발화 문맥의 음운오류패턴 비교

Vowel space area in later childhood and adolescence: Effects of age, sex and ease of communication

This study investigated vowel space area (VSA) development in childhood and adolescence and its impact on the ability to hyperarticulate vowels. In experiment 1, 96 participants aged 9–14 years carried out an interactive task when communication was easy (no barrier, ‘NB’) and difficult (the speech of one participant was filtered through a vocoder, ‘VOC’). Previous recordings from 20 adults were used as reference. Measures of VSA (ERB2), F1 and F2 ranges (ERB) and articulation rate were obtained. Children's VSA were significantly larger than adults'. From the age of 11, vowel hyperarticulation was evident in VOC, but only because VSA were gradually reducing with age in NB. The results suggest that whilst large VSA do not prevent children from hyperarticulating vowels, the manner in which this is achieved may not be adult-like. Experiment 2 was conducted to verify that large VSA were not a by-product of children being unable to see each other. Thirteen participants carried out the same task face-to-face with their interlocutor. Comparisons to matched participants from experiment 1 showed no differences in VSA, indicating that the audio-only modality did not influence results. Possible reasons for larger VSA in the spontaneous speech of children and adolescents are discussed.

Structural priming in Spanish as evidence of implicit learning

This study uses a structural priming technique with young Spanish speakers to test whether exposure to a rare syntactic form in Spanish (fue-passive) would increase the production and comprehension of that form. In Study 1, 14 six-year-old Spanish speakers described pictures of transitive scenes. This baseline study revealed that fue-passives were virtually non-existent in children's spontaneous speech. Using the priming technique in Study 2, an additional 56 Spanish-speaking children were exposed to fue-passive or active picture descriptions; we varied whether children repeated the modeled form. With repetition, production of fue-passives increased past baseline usage. When not asked to repeat, comprehension and production of fue-passives was no different than chance. Results extend the existing literature by experimentally testing input effects on the production and comprehension of infrequently used constructions, further corroborating the relation between input frequency and language skill. Findings are consistent with the view that an implicit learning mechanism guides language learning.

Russian pseudosynonymous prepositional constructions: semantics and acquisition

This study is devoted to the semantics and acquisition of two semantically close groups of Russian pseudosynonymous prepositional constructions: 1) constructions with speech act verbs: govorit’ oYLoc / govorit’ proYAcc meaning ‘to speak about Y’; 2) ‘verbs of sorrow’ constructions: skucat’ oYLoc / skucat’ poYDat meaning ‘to miss Y’. The constructions in each group differ in preposition and case. They used to be considered synonymous. Indeed, the interchangeability of the two constructions in each group is possible in most examples, but according to data retrieved from the Russian National Corpus, there are contexts that make this interchangeability impossible. Having analyzed Ruscorpora data from the CxG point of view, we can see that the semantic differences between the two constructions in each group are connected with the restrictions which the construction as a whole imposes on the semantics of its components. The results of the investigation of the acquisition emphasises the semantic differences between the two constructions in each group. This part of the study is based on the longitudinal data of the speech of the authour’s daughter and the records of the spontaneous speech of children learning Russian as a native language kindly provided by the Department of Child Language, Saint-Petersburg State Pedagogical University.

Longitudinal data on the production of content versus function words in children's spontaneous speech

Allen and Hawkins (1978; 1980) were among the first to note rhythmic differences in the speech of children and adults. Sirsa and Redford (2011) found that rhythmic differences between younger and older children’s speech was best accounted for by age-related differences in function word production. In other on-going work (Redford, Kallay & Dilley) we found an effect of age on the perceived prominence of function words in children’s speech, but no effect on content words. The current longitudinal study investigated the effect of word class (content versus function words) on the development of reduction in terms of syllable duration and pitch range (a correlate of accenting). Spontaneous speech was elicited for 3 years from 36 children aged 5; 2–6; 11 at time of first recording. There were effects of word class (content > function) and of time on median duration, but no interaction between these factors. The median duration decreased 13% in function words from the 1st to 3rd year; a similar decrease (15%) was found for content words. Pitch range only varied systematically with word class. Other spectral measures are being collected to further investigate the development of reduction in children's speech. [Work supported by NICHD.]

Developmental inventories using illiterate parents as informants: Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) adaptation for two Kenyan languages.

Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs, parent-completed language development checklists) are a helpful tool to assess language in children who are unused to interaction with unfamiliar adults. Generally, CDIs are completed in written form, but in developing country settings parents may have insufficient literacy to complete them alone. We designed CDIs to assess language development in children aged 0;8 to 2;4 in two languages used in Coastal communities in Kenya. Measures of vocabulary, gestures, and grammatical constructions were developed using both interviews with parents from varying backgrounds, and vocabulary as well as grammatical constructions from recordings of children's spontaneous speech. The CDIs were then administered in interview format to over 300 families. Reliability and validity ranged from acceptable to excellent, supporting the use of CDIs when direct language testing is impractical, even when children have multiple caregivers and where respondents have low literacy levels.