2021/02/06 by Stephan C. Meylan, Meylan, Stephan C., Ruthe Foushee +6
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Psychology · #Language Development and Disorders #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Speech and dialogue systems #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2102.03462
13 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Edit #1 fixes formatting on table 1 (fitting it onto a single page) and reports correct contents for table 1 (previous version reported ants, not bits)
arxiv created 2021/02/09 · arxiv updated 2021/02/10
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.