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arXiv 2102.03462cs.CL

Child-directed Listening: How Caregiver Inference Enables Children's Early Verbal Communication

MIT(麻省理工学院);Duke University(杜克大学);University of Chicago(芝加哥大学)

Stephan C. Meylan, Ruthe Foushee, Elika Bergelson, Roger P. Levy

英文摘要:

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 suite of Bayesian models of spoken word recognition to understand how adults overcome the noisiness of child language, showing that communicative success between children and adults relies heavily on adult inferential processes. By evaluating competing models on phonetically-annotated corpora, we show that adults' recovered meanings are best predicted by prior expectations fitted specifically to the child language environment, rather than to typical adult-adult language. After quantifying the contribution of this "child-directed listening" over developmental time, we discuss the consequences for theories of language acquisition, as well as the implications for commonly-used methods for assessing children's linguistic proficiency.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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