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Kehoe M, Philippart de Foy M. The Development of Alveolar and Alveopalatal Fricatives in French-Speaking Monolingual and Bilingual Children. JOURNAL OF SPEECH, LANGUAGE, AND HEARING RESEARCH : JSLHR 2023; 66:475-502. [PMID: 36652703 DOI: 10.1044/2022_jslhr-22-00387] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/17/2023]
Abstract
PURPOSE This study conducted a transcription-based and spectral moments' analysis of alveolar and alveopalatal fricatives in monolingual and bilingual French-speaking children, aged 2;6-6;10 (years;months). We measured the percent accuracy of fricatives and investigated whether young children could distinguish alveolar and alveopalatal fricatives on the basis of spectral moments. In addition, we examined which child- (i.e., age, gender, bilingualism, and alveopalatal fricative inventory size) and word/sound-related (i.e., place-of-articulation [PoA], voicing, vowel quality, and word position) factors influenced spectral moments and fricative duration. METHOD Children (N = 89) participated in a picture-naming task in which they produced words containing alveolar /s, z/ and alveopalatal /ʃ, ʒ/ fricatives in word-initial, -medial, and -final positions. The words were transcribed and analyzed acoustically, and the first and third spectral moments (i.e., centroid and skewness) and the duration of fricatives were calculated. The data were subject to mixed-effects linear regression. RESULTS Percent accuracy results indicated effects of age on alveopalatal fricatives and effects of word position on voiced fricatives. Statistical models indicated that age, gender, and alveopalatal fricative inventory size influenced spectral moments. Age and inventory size interacted significantly with PoA. Children as young as age 2;6 distinguished alveopalatal and alveolar fricatives on the basis of centroid but not skewness values. The distinction between the two sets of fricatives increased with age. Bilingual children who spoke languages with greater numbers of alveopalatal fricatives distinguished alveopalatal and alveolar fricatives less well than monolinguals and bilinguals who spoke languages with fewer numbers of alveopalatal fricatives. Girls had higher centroid and lower skewness values than boys. Models also revealed a significant influence of word/sound-related factors (voicing, vowel quality, and word position) on spectral moments and fricative duration. CONCLUSIONS Findings indicated that multiple factors influence the spectral moments and duration measures of children's alveolar and alveopalatal fricatives. In particular, we found that spectral moments were sensitive to gender and bilingualism effects.
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Cychosz M. LANGUAGE EXPOSURE PREDICTS CHILDREN'S PHONETIC PATTERNING: EVIDENCE FROM LANGUAGE SHIFT. LANGUAGE 2022; 98:461-509. [PMID: 37034148 PMCID: PMC10079255 DOI: 10.1353/lan.0.0269] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/19/2023]
Abstract
Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children's phonetic development, and receptive and expressive language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular, because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way-by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the amount of children's exposure to two languages and the ratio of expressive to receptive experiences. A large-scale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children's and their caregivers' bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children's patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children's expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure, while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children's role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.
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Sainburg T, Mai A, Gentner TQ. Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition. Proc Biol Sci 2022; 289:20212657. [PMID: 35259983 PMCID: PMC8905171 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.2657] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/07/2021] [Accepted: 02/01/2022] [Indexed: 12/27/2022] Open
Abstract
To convey meaning, human language relies on hierarchically organized, long-range relationships spanning words, phrases, sentences and discourse. As the distances between elements (e.g. phonemes, characters, words) in human language sequences increase, the strength of the long-range relationships between those elements decays following a power law. This power-law relationship has been attributed variously to long-range sequential organization present in human language syntax, semantics and discourse structure. However, non-linguistic behaviours in numerous phylogenetically distant species, ranging from humpback whale song to fruit fly motility, also demonstrate similar long-range statistical dependencies. Therefore, we hypothesized that long-range statistical dependencies in human speech may occur independently of linguistic structure. To test this hypothesis, we measured long-range dependencies in several speech corpora from children (aged 6 months-12 years). We find that adult-like power-law statistical dependencies are present in human vocalizations at the earliest detectable ages, prior to the production of complex linguistic structure. These linguistic structures cannot, therefore, be the sole cause of long-range statistical dependencies in language.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tim Sainburg
- Department of Psychology, Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
- Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny, Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
| | - Anna Mai
- Department of Linguistics, Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
| | - Timothy Q. Gentner
- Department of Psychology, Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
- Neurosciences Graduate Program, Neurobiology Section, Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
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Abstract
Children learn the abstract, challenging categories of emotions from young ages, and it has recently been suggested that language (and more specifically emotion words) may aid this learning. To examine the language that young children hear and produce as they're learning emotion categories, the present study examined nearly 2,000 transcripts from 179 children ranging from 15- to 47-months from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Results provide key descriptive, developmental, and predictive information regarding child emotion language production, including the finding that child emotion word production was predicted by mothers' emotion word production (β=.21, p<.001), but not by child or mother language complexity (β=.01, p=.690; β=.00, p=.872). Frequency of specific emotion words are presented, as are developmental trends in early emotion language production and input. These results improve the understanding of children's daily emotional language environments and may inform theories of emotional development.
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Cychosz M. The coarticulation-duration relationship in early Quechua speech. JOURNAL OF PHONETICS 2021; 87:101052. [PMID: 34690383 PMCID: PMC8536153 DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101052] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/13/2023]
Abstract
Evidence from acoustic and articulatory phonetics suggests that children coarticulate more than adults, but previous work has focused on the instantiation of coarticulation with phonology in a typologically homogeneous sample. The interplay of coarticulation with children's speaking rate has also been ignored. How do coarticulation and speaking rate (duration) interact over the course of development, and does the interaction manifest differently across distinct morphological environments? To answer this, the current study measured the speech patterns of bilingual Quechua-Spanish children (5-10 years) and adults. Coarticulation and duration were measured in two word environments, within morphemes and across morpheme boundaries. Unsurprisingly, adults consistently coarticulated more in shorter duration sequences, in both morphological environments. The children's coarticulation-duration patterns, however, varied by morphological environment. Additionally, the children's speech patterns, but not the adults', were sensitive to prosodic length: children produced increasingly shorter phones in words with more syllables. It is suggested that the differences between adults and children are attributable to adults' faster speaking rate and increased dominance in Quechua.
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Affiliation(s)
- Margaret Cychosz
- Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing and Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland-College Park, 0100 Samuel J. LeFrak Hall, College Park, USA
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Zhu J, Hasegawa-Johnson M, McElwain N. A COMPARISON STUDY ON INFANT-PARENT VOICE DIARIZATION. PROCEEDINGS OF THE ... IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING. ICASSP (CONFERENCE) 2021; 2021:7178-7182. [PMID: 35291257 PMCID: PMC8919348 DOI: 10.1109/icassp39728.2021.9413538] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/14/2023]
Abstract
We design a framework for studying prelinguistic child voice from 3 to 24 months based on state-of-the-art algorithms in diarization. Our system consists of a time-invariant feature extractor, a context-dependent embedding generator, and a classifier. We study the effect of swapping out different components of the system, as well as changing loss function, to find the best performance. We also present a multiple-instance learning technique that allows us to pre-train our parameters on larger datasets with coarser segment boundary labels. We found that our best system achieved 43.8% DER on test dataset, compared to 55.4% DER achieved by LENA software. We also found that using convolutional feature extractor instead of logmel features significantly increases the performance of neural diarization.
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Affiliation(s)
- Junzhe Zhu
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Cychosz M, Munson B, Edwards JR. Practice and experience predict coarticulation in child speech. LANGUAGE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT : THE OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 2021; 17:366-396. [PMID: 34483779 PMCID: PMC8412131 DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1890080] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/13/2023]
Abstract
Much research in child speech development suggests that young children coarticulate more than adults. There are multiple, not mutually-exclusive, explanations for this pattern. For example, children may coarticulate more because they are limited by immature motor control. Or they may coarticulate more if they initially represent phonological segments in larger, more holistic units such as syllables or feet. We tested the importance of several different explanations for coarticulation in child speech by evaluating how four-year-olds' language experience, speech practice, and speech planning predicted their coarticulation between adjacent segments in real words and paired nonwords. Children with larger vocabularies coarticulated less, especially in real words, though there were no reliable coarticulatory differences between real words and nonwords after controlling for word duration. Children who vocalized more throughout a daylong audio recording also coarticulated less. Quantity of child vocalizations was more predictive of the degree of children's coarticulation than a measure of receptive language experience, adult word count. Overall, these results suggest strong roles for children's phonological representations and speech practice, as well as their immature fine motor control, for coarticulatory development.
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Affiliation(s)
- Margaret Cychosz
- Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park
- Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing, University of Maryland, College Park
| | - Benjamin Munson
- Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
| | - Jan R. Edwards
- Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park
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Terband H, Namasivayam A, Maas E, van Brenk F, Mailend ML, Diepeveen S, van Lieshout P, Maassen B. Assessment of Childhood Apraxia of Speech: A Review/Tutorial of Objective Measurement Techniques. JOURNAL OF SPEECH, LANGUAGE, AND HEARING RESEARCH : JSLHR 2019; 62:2999-3032. [PMID: 31465704 DOI: 10.1044/2019_jslhr-s-csmc7-19-0214] [Citation(s) in RCA: 19] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/10/2023]
Abstract
Background With respect to the clinical criteria for diagnosing childhood apraxia of speech (commonly defined as a disorder of speech motor planning and/or programming), research has made important progress in recent years. Three segmental and suprasegmental speech characteristics-error inconsistency, lengthened and disrupted coarticulation, and inappropriate prosody-have gained wide acceptance in the literature for purposes of participant selection. However, little research has sought to empirically test the diagnostic validity of these features. One major obstacle to such empirical study is the fact that none of these features is stated in operationalized terms. Purpose This tutorial provides a structured overview of perceptual, acoustic, and articulatory measurement procedures that have been used or could be used to operationalize and assess these 3 core characteristics. Methodological details are reviewed for each procedure, along with a short overview of research results reported in the literature. Conclusion The 3 types of measurement procedures should be seen as complementary. Some characteristics are better suited to be described at the perceptual level (especially phonemic errors and prosody), others at the acoustic level (especially phonetic distortions, coarticulation, and prosody), and still others at the kinematic level (especially coarticulation, stability, and gestural coordination). The type of data collected determines, to a large extent, the interpretation that can be given regarding the underlying deficit. Comprehensive studies are needed that include more than 1 diagnostic feature and more than 1 type of measurement procedure.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hayo Terband
- Utrecht Institute of Linguistics-OTS, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
| | - Aravind Namasivayam
- Oral Dynamics Laboratory, Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
| | - Edwin Maas
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
| | - Frits van Brenk
- Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo, NY
| | - Marja-Liisa Mailend
- Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, Moss Rehabilitation Hospital, Elkins Park, PA
| | - Sanne Diepeveen
- HAN University of Applied Sciences, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
- Department of Rehabilitation, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
| | - Pascal van Lieshout
- Oral Dynamics Laboratory, Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
| | - Ben Maassen
- Center for Language and Cognition, Research School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
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Grimm R, Cassani G, Gillis S, Daelemans W. Children Probably Store Short Rather Than Frequent or Predictable Chunks: Quantitative Evidence From a Corpus Study. Front Psychol 2019; 10:80. [PMID: 30761044 PMCID: PMC6363945 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00080] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/31/2018] [Accepted: 01/11/2019] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
One of the tasks faced by young children is the segmentation of a continuous stream of speech into discrete linguistic units. Early in development, syllables emerge as perceptual primitives, and the wholesale storage of syllable chunks is one possible strategy for bootstrapping the segmentation process. Here, we investigate what types of chunks children store. Our method involves selecting syllabified utterances from corpora of child-directed speech, which we vary according to (a) their length in syllables, (b) the mutual predictability of their syllables, and (c) their frequency. We then use the number of utterances within which words are contained to predict the time course of word learning, arguing that utterances which perform well at this task are also more likely to be stored, by young children, as undersegmented chunks. Our results show that short utterances are best-suited for predicting when children acquire the words contained within them, although the effect is rather small. Beyond this, we also find that short utterances are the most likely to correspond to words. Together, the two findings suggest that children may not store many complete utterances as undersegmented chunks, with most of the units that children store as hypothesized words corresponding to actual words. However, dovetailing with an item-based account of language-acquisition, when children do store undersegmented chunks, these are likely to be short sequences-not frequent or internally predictable multi-word chunks. We end by discussing implications for work on formulaic multi-word sequences.
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Affiliation(s)
- Robert Grimm
- Department of Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Research Center, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
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Tomas E, Demuth K, Petocz P. The Role of Frequency in Learning Morphophonological Alternations: Implications for Children With Specific Language Impairment. JOURNAL OF SPEECH, LANGUAGE, AND HEARING RESEARCH : JSLHR 2017; 60:1316-1329. [PMID: 28510615 PMCID: PMC5755550 DOI: 10.1044/2016_jslhr-l-16-0138] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/07/2016] [Revised: 09/13/2016] [Accepted: 11/08/2016] [Indexed: 06/07/2023]
Abstract
PURPOSE The aim of this article was to explore how the type of allomorph (e.g., past tense buzz[d] vs. nod[əd]) influences the ability to perceive and produce grammatical morphemes in children with typical development and with specific language impairment (SLI). METHOD The participants were monolingual Australian English-speaking children. The SLI group included 13 participants (mean age = 5;7 [years;months]); the control group included 19 children with typical development (mean age = 5;4). Both groups performed a grammaticality judgment and elicited production task with the same set of nonce verbs in third-person singular and past tense forms. RESULTS Five-year-old children are still learning to generalize morphophonological patterns to novel verbs, and syllabic /əz/ and /əd/ allomorphs are significantly more challenging to produce, particularly for the SLI group. The greater phonetic content of these syllabic forms did not enhance perception. CONCLUSIONS Acquisition of morphophonological patterns involving low-frequency allomorphs is still underway in 5-year-old children with typical development, and it is even more protracted in SLI populations, despite these patterns being highly predictable. Children with SLI will therefore benefit from targeted intervention with low-frequency allomorphs.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ekaterina Tomas
- Neurolinguistics Laboratory, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
| | - Katherine Demuth
- ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, North Ryde, Australia
- Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico
| | - Peter Petocz
- Department of Statistics, Macquarie University, North Ryde, Australia
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Grimm R, Cassani G, Gillis S, Daelemans W. Facilitatory Effects of Multi-Word Units in Lexical Processing and Word Learning: A Computational Investigation. Front Psychol 2017; 8:555. [PMID: 28450842 PMCID: PMC5390038 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00555] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/11/2017] [Accepted: 03/27/2017] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Previous studies have suggested that children and adults form cognitive representations of co-occurring word sequences. We propose (1) that the formation of such multi-word unit (MWU) representations precedes and facilitates the formation of single-word representations in children and thus benefits word learning, and (2) that MWU representations facilitate adult word recognition and thus benefit lexical processing. Using a modified version of an existing computational model (McCauley and Christiansen, 2014), we extract MWUs from a corpus of child-directed speech (CDS) and a corpus of conversations among adults. We then correlate the number of MWUs within which each word appears with (1) age of first production and (2) adult reaction times on a word recognition task. In doing so, we take care to control for the effect of word frequency, as frequent words will naturally tend to occur in many MWUs. We also compare results to a baseline model which randomly groups words into sequences-and find that MWUs have a unique facilitatory effect on both response variables, suggesting that they benefit word learning in children and word recognition in adults. The effect is strongest on age of first production, implying that MWUs are comparatively more important for word learning than for adult lexical processing. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms and formulate testable predictions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Robert Grimm
- Department of Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Research Center, University of AntwerpAntwerp, Belgium
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Miles K, Yuen I, Cox F, Demuth K. The prosodic licensing of coda consonants in early speech: interactions with vowel length. JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE 2016; 43:265-283. [PMID: 26017220 DOI: 10.1017/s0305000915000185] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/04/2023]
Abstract
English has a word-minimality requirement that all open-class lexical items must contain at least two moras of structure, forming a bimoraic foot (Hayes, 1995).Thus, a word with either a long vowel, or a short vowel and a coda consonant, satisfies this requirement. This raises the question of when and how young children might learn this language-specific constraint, and if they would use coda consonants earlier and more reliably after short vowels compared to long vowels. To evaluate this possibility we conducted an elicited imitation experiment with 15 two-year-old Australian English-speaking children, using both perceptual and acoustic analysis. As predicted, the children produced codas more often when preceded by short vowels. The findings suggest that English-speaking two-year-olds are sensitive to language-specific lexical constraints, and are more likely to use coda consonants when prosodically required.
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Demuth K. Prosodic Licensing and the development of phonological and morphological representations. PERSPECTIVES ON PHONOLOGICAL THEORY AND DEVELOPMENT 2014. [DOI: 10.1075/lald.56.04dem] [Citation(s) in RCA: 16] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/07/2022]
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