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| Publications of Elika Bergelson :chronological alphabetical combined listing:
%% Journal Articles
@article{fds376037,
Author = {Moore, C and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Wordform variability in infants' language environment and
its effects on early word learning.},
Journal = {Cognition},
Volume = {245},
Pages = {105694},
Year = {2024},
Month = {April},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105694},
Abstract = {Most research regarding early word learning in English tends
to make the simplifying assumption that there exists a
one-to-one mapping between concrete objects and their
labels. In the current work, we provide evidence that runs
counter to this assumption, aligning English with more
morphologically-rich languages. We suggest that even in a
morphologically-poor language like English, real world
language input to infants does not provide tidy 1-to-1
mappings. Instead, infants encounter many variant wordforms
for familiar nouns (e.g. dog∼doggy∼dogs). We explore
this wordform variability in 44 English-learning infants'
naturalistic environments using a longitudinal corpus of
infant-available speech. We look at both the frequency and
composition of wordform variability. We find two broad
categories of variability: referent-changing alterations,
where words were pluralized or compounded (e.g.
coat∼raincoats); and wordplay, where words changed form
without a notable change in referent (e.g. bird∼birdie).
We further find that wordplay occurs with a limited number
of lemmas that are usually early-learned, high-frequency,
and shorter. When looking at all wordform variability, we
find that individual words with higher levels of wordform
variability are learned earlier than words with fewer
wordforms, over and above the effect of frequency.},
Doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105694},
Key = {fds376037}
}
@article{fds375235,
Author = {Laing, C and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Analyzing the effect of sibling number on input and output
in the first 18 months.},
Journal = {Infancy : the official journal of the International Society
on Infant Studies},
Volume = {29},
Number = {2},
Pages = {175-195},
Publisher = {WILEY},
Year = {2024},
Month = {March},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/infa.12578},
Abstract = {Prior research suggests that across a wide range of
cognitive, educational, and health-based measures,
first-born children outperform their later-born peers.
Expanding on this literature using naturalistic
home-recorded data and parental vocabulary reports, we find
that early language outcomes vary by number of siblings in a
sample of 43 English-learning U.S. children from mid-to-high
socioeconomic status homes. More specifically, we find that
children in our sample with two or more-but not one-older
siblings had smaller productive vocabularies at 18 months,
and heard less input from caregivers across several measures
than their peers with less than two siblings. We discuss
implications regarding what infants experience and learn
across a range of family sizes in infancy.},
Doi = {10.1111/infa.12578},
Key = {fds375235}
}
@article{fds375505,
Author = {Campbell, E and Casillas, R and Bergelson, E},
Title = {The role of vision in the acquisition of words: Vocabulary
development in blind toddlers.},
Journal = {Developmental science},
Pages = {e13475},
Year = {2024},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/desc.13475},
Abstract = {What is vision's role in driving early word production? To
answer this, we assessed parent-report vocabulary
questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children
(N = 40, Mean age = 24 months [R: 7-57 months]) and
compared the size and contents of their productive
vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted
children (N = 6574). We found that on average, blind
children showed a roughly half-year vocabulary delay
relative to sighted children, amid considerable variability.
However, the content of blind and sighted children's
vocabulary was statistically indistinguishable in word
length, part of speech, semantic category, concreteness,
interactiveness, and perceptual modality. At a finer-grained
level, we also found that words' perceptual properties
intersect with children's perceptual abilities. Our findings
suggest that while an absence of visual input may initially
make vocabulary development more difficult, the content of
the early productive vocabulary is largely resilient to
differences in perceptual access. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS:
Infants and toddlers born blind (with no other diagnoses)
show a 7.5 month productive vocabulary delay on average,
with wide variability. Across the studied age range
(7-57 months), vocabulary delays widened with age. Blind
and sighted children's early vocabularies contain similar
distributions of word lengths, parts of speech, semantic
categories, and perceptual modalities. Blind children (but
not sighted children) were more likely to say visual words
which could also be experienced through other
senses.},
Doi = {10.1111/desc.13475},
Key = {fds375505}
}
@article{fds373687,
Author = {Meylan, SC and Foushee, R and Wong, NH and Bergelson, E and Levy,
RP},
Title = {How adults understand what young children
say.},
Journal = {Nature human behaviour},
Volume = {7},
Number = {12},
Pages = {2111-2125},
Year = {2023},
Month = {December},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01698-3},
Abstract = {Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to
that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are
able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we
investigate how adult listeners' inferences reflect
sophisticated beliefs about what children are trying to
communicate, as well as how children are likely to pronounce
words. Using a Bayesian framework for modelling spoken word
recognition, we find that computational models can replicate
adult interpretations of children's speech only when they
include strong, context-specific prior expectations about
the messages that children will want to communicate. This
points to a critical role of adult cognitive processes in
supporting early communication and reveals how children can
actively prompt adults to take actions on their behalf even
when they have only a nascent understanding of the adult
language. We discuss the wide-ranging implications of the
powerful listening capabilities of adults for theories of
first language acquisition.},
Doi = {10.1038/s41562-023-01698-3},
Key = {fds373687}
}
@article{fds374572,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Soderstrom, M and Schwarz, I-C and Rowland, CF and Ramírez-Esparza, N and R Hamrick and L and Marklund, E and Kalashnikova, M and Guez, A and Casillas, M and Benetti, L and Alphen,
PV and Cristia, A},
Title = {Everyday language input and production in 1,001 children
from six continents.},
Journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America},
Volume = {120},
Number = {52},
Pages = {e2300671120},
Year = {2023},
Month = {December},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2300671120},
Abstract = {Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by
young children, who otherwise struggle with many basics of
survival. And yet, language ability is variable across
individuals. Naturalistic and experimental observations
suggest that children's linguistic skills vary with factors
like socioeconomic status and children's gender. But which
factors really influence children's day-to-day language use?
Here, we leverage speech technology in a big-data approach
to report on a unique cross-cultural and diverse data set:
>2,500 d-long, child-centered audio-recordings of 1,001 2-
to 48-mo-olds from 12 countries spanning six continents
across urban, farmer-forager, and subsistence-farming
contexts. As expected, age and language-relevant clinical
risks and diagnoses predicted how much speech (and
speech-like vocalization) children produced. Critically, so
too did adult talk in children's environments: Children who
heard more talk from adults produced more speech. In
contrast to previous conclusions based on more limited
sampling methods and a different set of language proxies,
socioeconomic status (operationalized as maternal education)
was not significantly associated with children's productions
over the first 4 y of life, and neither were gender or
multilingualism. These findings from large-scale
naturalistic data advance our understanding of which factors
are robust predictors of variability in the speech behaviors
of young learners in a wide range of everyday
contexts.},
Doi = {10.1073/pnas.2300671120},
Key = {fds374572}
}
@article{fds370372,
Author = {Liu, J and Hilton, CB and Bergelson, E and Mehr, SA},
Title = {Language experience predicts music processing in a
half-million speakers of fifty-four languages.},
Journal = {Current biology : CB},
Volume = {33},
Number = {10},
Pages = {1916-1925.e4},
Publisher = {Elsevier BV},
Year = {2023},
Month = {May},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.03.067},
Abstract = {Tonal languages differ from other languages in their use of
pitch (tones) to distinguish words. Lifelong experience
speaking and hearing tonal languages has been argued to
shape auditory processing in ways that generalize beyond the
perception of linguistic pitch to the perception of pitch in
other domains like music. We conducted a meta-analysis of
prior studies testing this idea, finding moderate evidence
supporting it. But prior studies were limited by mostly
small sample sizes representing a small number of languages
and countries, making it challenging to disentangle the
effects of linguistic experience from variability in music
training, cultural differences, and other potential
confounds. To address these issues, we used web-based
citizen science to assess music perception skill on a global
scale in 34,034 native speakers of 19 tonal languages (e.g.,
Mandarin, Yoruba). We compared their performance to 459,066
native speakers of other languages, including 6
pitch-accented (e.g., Japanese) and 29 non-tonal languages
(e.g., Hungarian). Whether or not participants had taken
music lessons, native speakers of all 19 tonal languages had
an improved ability to discriminate musical melodies on
average, relative to speakers of non-tonal languages. But
this improvement came with a trade-off: tonal language
speakers were also worse at processing the musical beat. The
results, which held across native speakers of many diverse
languages and were robust to geographic and demographic
variation, demonstrate that linguistic experience shapes
music perception, with implications for relations between
music, language, and culture in the human
mind.},
Doi = {10.1016/j.cub.2023.03.067},
Key = {fds370372}
}
@article{fds367924,
Author = {Bulgarelli, F and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Talker variability is not always the right noise: 14 month
olds struggle to learn dissimilar word-object pairs under
talker variability conditions.},
Journal = {Journal of experimental child psychology},
Volume = {227},
Pages = {105575},
Year = {2023},
Month = {March},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105575},
Abstract = {Seminal work by Stager & Werker (1997) finds that
14-month-olds can rapidly learn two word-object pairings if
the words are distinct (e.g. "neem" and "lif") but not
similar (e.g. the minimal pair "bih" and "dih"). More
recently, studies have found that adding talker variability
during exposure to new word-object pairs lets 14-month-olds
succeed on the more challenging minimal pair task,
presumably due to talker variability highlighting the
"relevant" consistencies between the similar words (Rost &
McMurray, 2009; Galle et al., 2015; Hohle et al., 2020). It
remains an open question, however, whether talker
variability would be similarly useful for learning new
word-object pairings when the words themselves are already
distinct, or whether instead this extra variability may
extinguish learning due to increased task demands. We find
evidence for the latter. Namely, in our sample of 54
English-learning 14-month-olds, training infants on two
word-object pairings (e.g. "neem" with a dog toy and "lof"
with a kitchen tool) only led them to notice when the words
and objects were switched if they were trained with
single-speaker identical word tokens. When the training
featured talker variability (from one or multiple talkers)
infants failed to learn the pairings. We suggest that when
talker variability is not necessary to highlight the
invariant differences between similar words, it may actually
increase task difficulty, making it harder for infants to
determine what to attend to in the earliest phases of word
learning.},
Doi = {10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105575},
Key = {fds367924}
}
@article{fds376090,
Author = {Lavechin, M and Metais, M and Titeux, H and Boissonnet, A and Copet, J and Riviere, M and Bergelson, E and Cristia, A and Dupoux, E and Bredin,
H},
Title = {Brouhaha: Multi-Task Training for Voice Activity Detection,
Speech-to-Noise Ratio, and C50 Room Acoustics
Estimation},
Journal = {2023 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding
Workshop, ASRU 2023},
Year = {2023},
Month = {January},
ISBN = {9798350306897},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ASRU57964.2023.10389718},
Abstract = {Most automatic speech processing systems register degraded
performance when applied to noisy or reverberant speech. But
how can one tell whether speech is noisy or reverberant? We
propose Brouhaha, a neural network jointly trained to
extract speech/non-speech segments, speech-to-noise ratios,
and C50 room acoustics from single-channel recordings.
Brouhaha is trained using a data-driven approach in which
noisy and reverberant audio segments are synthesized. We
first evaluate its performance and demonstrate that the
proposed multi-task regime is beneficial. We then present
two scenarios illustrating how Brouhaha can be used on
naturally noisy and reverberant data: 1) to investigate the
errors made by a speaker diarization model (pyannote.audio);
and 2) to assess the reliability of an automatic speech
recognition model (Whisper from OpenAI). Both our pipeline
and a pretrained model are open source and shared with the
speech community.},
Doi = {10.1109/ASRU57964.2023.10389718},
Key = {fds376090}
}
@article{fds364057,
Author = {Moore, C and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Examining the roles of regularity and lexical class in
18–26-month-olds’ representations of how words
sound},
Journal = {Journal of Memory and Language},
Volume = {126},
Year = {2022},
Month = {October},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2022.104337},
Abstract = {By around 12 months, infants have well-specified phonetic
representations for the nouns they understand, for instance
looking less at a car upon hearing ‘cur’ than ‘car’
(Swingley and Aslin, 2002). Here we test whether such
high-fidelity representations extend to irregular nouns, and
regular and irregular verbs. A corpus analysis confirms the
intuition that irregular verbs are far more common than
irregular nouns in speech to young children. Two eyetracking
experiments then test whether toddlers are sensitive to
mispronunciation in regular and irregular nouns (Experiment
1) and verbs (Experiment 2). For nouns, we find a
mispronunciation effect and no regularity effect in
18-month-olds. For verbs, in Experiment 2a, we find only a
regularity effect and no mispronunciation effect in
18-month-olds, though toddlers’ poor comprehension overall
limits interpretation. Finally, in Experiment 2b we find a
mispronunciation effect and no regularity effect in
26-month-olds. The interlocking roles of lexical class and
regularity for wordform representations and early word
learning are discussed.},
Doi = {10.1016/j.jml.2022.104337},
Key = {fds364057}
}
@article{fds364058,
Author = {Campbell, EE and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Making sense of sensory language: Acquisition of sensory
knowledge by individuals with congenital sensory
impairments.},
Journal = {Neuropsychologia},
Volume = {174},
Pages = {108320},
Publisher = {Elsevier BV},
Year = {2022},
Month = {September},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108320},
Abstract = {The present article provides a narrative review on how
language communicates sensory information and how knowledge
of sight and sound develops in individuals born deaf or
blind. Studying knowledge of the perceptually inaccessible
sensory domain for these populations offers a lens into how
humans learn about that which they cannot perceive. We first
review the linguistic strategies within language that
communicate sensory information. Highlighting the power of
language to shape knowledge, we next review the detailed
knowledge of sensory information by individuals with
congenital sensory impairments, limitations therein, and
neural representations of imperceptible phenomena. We
suggest that the acquisition of sensory knowledge is
supported by language, experience with multiple perceptual
domains, and cognitive and social abilities which mature
over the first years of life, both in individuals with and
without sensory impairment. We conclude by proposing a
developmental trajectory for acquiring sensory knowledge in
the absence of sensory perception.},
Doi = {10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108320},
Key = {fds364058}
}
@article{fds360576,
Author = {Dailey, S and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Language input to infants of different socioeconomic
statuses: A quantitative meta-analysis.},
Journal = {Developmental science},
Volume = {25},
Number = {3},
Pages = {e13192},
Year = {2022},
Month = {May},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/desc.13192},
Abstract = {For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated
language input to children from high- and low-socioeconomic
status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a "30
Million Word Gap" between high-SES and low-SES children.
More recent studies have challenged the size or even
existence of this gap. The present study is a quantitative
meta-analysis on socioeconomic differences in language input
to young children, which aims to systematically integrate
decades of research on this topic. We analyzed 19 studies
and found a significant effect of SES on language input
quantity. However, this effect was moderated by the type of
language included in language quantity measures: studies
that include only child-directed speech in their language
measures find a large SES difference, while studies that
include all speech in a child's environment find no effect
of SES. These results support recent work suggesting that
methodological decisions can affect researchers' estimates
of the "word gap." Overall, we find that young children from
low-SES homes heard less child-directed speech than children
from mid- to high-SES homes, though this difference was much
smaller than Hart & Risley's "30 Million Word Gap." Finally,
we underscore the need for more cross-cultural work on
language development and the forces that may contribute to
it, highlighting the opportunity for better integration of
observational, experimental, and intervention-based approaches.},
Doi = {10.1111/desc.13192},
Key = {fds360576}
}
@article{fds362823,
Author = {Campbell, E and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Characterizing North Carolina's Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Infants and Toddlers: Predictors of Vocabulary, Diagnosis,
and Intervention.},
Journal = {Journal of speech, language, and hearing research :
JSLHR},
Volume = {65},
Number = {5},
Pages = {1894-1905},
Year = {2022},
Month = {May},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2022_jslhr-21-00245},
Abstract = {<h4>Purpose</h4>This study sought to (a) characterize the
demographic, audiological, and intervention variability in a
population of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children
receiving state services for hearing loss; (b) identify
predictors of vocabulary delays; and (c) evaluate factors
influencing the success and timing of early identification
and intervention efforts at a state level.<h4>Method</h4>One
hundred DHH infants and toddlers (aged 4-36 months) enrolled
in early intervention completed the MacArthur-Bates
Communicative Development Inventories, and detailed
information about their audiological and clinical history
was collected. We examined the influence of demographic,
clinical, and audiological factors on vocabulary outcomes
and early intervention efforts.<h4>Results</h4>We found that
this sample showed spoken language vocabulary delays
(production) relative to hearing peers and showed room for
improvement in rates of early diagnosis and intervention.
These delays in vocabulary and early support services were
predicted by an overlapping subset of hearing-, health-, and
home-related variables.<h4>Conclusions</h4>In a diverse
sample of DHH children receiving early intervention, we
identify variables that predict delays in vocabulary and
early support services, which reflected <i>both</i>
dimensions that are immutable, and those that clinicians and
caretakers can potentially alter. We provide a discussion on
the implications for clinical practice.<h4>Supplemental
material</h4>https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19449839.},
Doi = {10.1044/2022_jslhr-21-00245},
Key = {fds362823}
}
@article{fds361385,
Author = {Bulgarelli, F and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Talker variability shapes early word representations in
English-learning 8-month-olds.},
Journal = {Infancy : the official journal of the International Society
on Infant Studies},
Volume = {27},
Number = {2},
Pages = {341-368},
Year = {2022},
Month = {March},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/infa.12452},
Abstract = {Infants must form appropriately specific representations of
how words sound and what they mean. Previous research
suggests that while 8-month-olds are learning words, they
struggle with recognizing different-sounding instances of
words (e.g., from new talkers) and with rejecting incorrect
pronunciations. We asked how adding talker variability
during learning may change infants' ability to learn and
recognize words. Monolingual English-learning 7- to
9-month-olds heard a single novel word paired with an object
in either a "no variability," "within-talker variability,"
or "between-talker variability" habituation. We then tested
whether infants formed appropriately specific
representations by changing the talker (Experiment 1a) or
mispronouncing the word (Experiment 2) and by changing the
trained word or object altogether (both experiments). Talker
variability influenced learning. Infants trained with
no-talker variability learned the word-object link, but
failed to recognize the word trained by a new talker, and
were insensitive to the mispronunciation. Infants trained
with talker variability dishabituated only to the new
object, exhibiting difficulty forming the word-object link.
Neither pattern is adult-like. Results are reported for both
in-lab and Zoom participants. Implications for the role of
talker variability in early word learning are
discussed.},
Doi = {10.1111/infa.12452},
Key = {fds361385}
}
@article{fds376603,
Author = {Casey, K and Elliott, M and Mickiewicz, E and Mandujano, AS and Shorter,
K and Duquette, M and Bergelson, E and Casillas, M},
Title = {Sticks, leaves, buckets, and bowls: Distributional patterns
of children's at-home object handling in two subsistence
societies},
Journal = {Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci
2022},
Pages = {927-933},
Year = {2022},
Month = {January},
Abstract = {Object-centric interactions provide rich learning moments
for young children, including opportunities to discover word
meanings. Children's first-person object handling
experiences, in particular, form a key source of input-one
that varies across cultures and across development. Using
daylong photo streams from child-worn cameras, we analyze
>17k images to identify the frequency and targets of child
object handling across the first four years in two
small-scale subsistence farming communities on opposite
sides of the globe (Rossel Papuan and Tseltal Mayan).
Overall, we see general consistency in the distribution of
object categories (e.g., consumables, mealtime tools,
natural objects, etc.) handled by children across cultures
and age, likely reflecting stable properties of children's
physical environments and day-to-day routines. However, the
exact objects available to children vary both within and
across communities and diversify with age. These various
distributions of handling patterns are discussed in their
relation to potential consequences for early
learning.},
Key = {fds376603}
}
@article{fds361950,
Author = {Meylan, SC and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Learning Through Processing: Toward an Integrated Approach
to Early Word Learning.},
Journal = {Annual review of linguistics},
Volume = {8},
Pages = {77-99},
Year = {2022},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031220-011146},
Abstract = {Children's linguistic knowledge and the learning mechanisms
by which they acquire it grow substantially in infancy and
toddlerhood, yet theories of word learning largely fail to
incorporate these shifts. Moreover, researchers'
often-siloed focus on either familiar word recognition or
novel word learning limits the critical consideration of how
these two relate. As a step toward a mechanistic theory of
language acquisition, we present a framework of "learning
through processing" and relate it to the prevailing methods
used to assess children's early knowledge of words.
Incorporating recent empirical work, we posit a specific,
testable timeline of qualitative changes in the learning
process in this interval. We conclude with several
challenges and avenues for building a comprehensive theory
of early word learning: better characterization of the
input, reconciling results across approaches, and treating
lexical knowledge in the nascent grammar with sufficient
sophistication to ensure generalizability across languages
and development.},
Doi = {10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031220-011146},
Key = {fds361950}
}
@article{fds363192,
Author = {Casey, K and Elliott, M and Mickiewicz, E and Mandujano, AS and Shorter,
K and Duquette, M and Bergelson, E and Casillas, M},
Title = {Sticks, leaves, buckets, and bowls: Distributional patterns
of children’s at-home object handling in two subsistence
societies},
Pages = {927-933},
Booktitle = {PsyArXiv},
Year = {2022},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yfnj4},
Abstract = {Object-centric interactions provide rich learning moments
for young children, including opportunities to discover word
meanings. Children's first-person object handling
experiences, in particular, form a key source of input-one
that varies across cultures and across development. Using
daylong photo streams from child-worn cameras, we analyze
>17k images to identify the frequency and targets of child
object handling across the first four years in two
small-scale subsistence farming communities on opposite
sides of the globe (Rossel Papuan and Tseltal Mayan).
Overall, we see general consistency in the distribution of
object categories (e.g., consumables, mealtime tools,
natural objects, etc.) handled by children across cultures
and age, likely reflecting stable properties of children's
physical environments and day-to-day routines. However, the
exact objects available to children vary both within and
across communities and diversify with age. These various
distributions of handling patterns are discussed in their
relation to potential consequences for early
learning.},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/yfnj4},
Key = {fds363192}
}
@article{fds367227,
Author = {Dailey, S and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Talking to talkers: Infants’ talk status, but not their
gender, is related to language input},
Volume = {94},
Number = {2},
Pages = {478-496},
Booktitle = {PsyArXiv},
Publisher = {WILEY},
Year = {2022},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ayx4b},
Abstract = {Prior research points to gender differences in some early
language skills, but is inconclusive about the mechanisms at
play, providing evidence that both infants' early input and
productions may differ by gender. This study examined the
linguistic input and early productions of 44 American
English-learning infants (93% White) in a longitudinal
sample of home recordings collected at 6-17 months (in
2014-2016). Girls produced more unique words than boys
(Cohen's d = .67) and this effect grew with age, but there
were no significant gender differences in language input
(d = .22-.24). Instead, caregivers talked more to infants
who had begun to talk (d = .93-.97), regardless of gender.
Therefore, prior results highlighting gender-based input
differences may have been due, at least partly, to this
talking-to-talkers effect.},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/ayx4b},
Key = {fds367227}
}
@article{fds366000,
Author = {Moore, C and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Wordform variability in infants' language environment and
its effects on early word learning},
Year = {2021},
Month = {September},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/n3phk},
Abstract = {<p>Traditional views of language development suggest that
noun learning involves creating a one-to-one mapping between
concrete objects and their labels. In the current work, we
provide evidence that real world language input to infants
does not provide such tidy mappings. Instead, infants
encounter many variant wordforms for familiar nouns(e.g.
dog∼doggy∼dogs). We explore this wordform variability in
44 English-learning infants’ naturalistic environments
using a longitudinal corpus of infant-available speech. We
looked at both the frequency and composition of wordform
variability. We found two broad categories of variability:
morpheme-adding changes, where words were pluralized or
compounded (e.g. coat∼raincoats); and wordplay, where
words changed form without any associated change in meaning
(e.g. bird∼birdie). Wordplay occured with a limited number
of lemmas that were usually early-learned, highly-frequent,
and shorter. When looking at all wordform variability, we
found that individual words with higher levels of wordform
variability were learned earlier than words with fewer
wordforms, over and above the effect of frequency.</p>},
Doi = {10.31219/osf.io/n3phk},
Key = {fds366000}
}
@article{fds366001,
Author = {Moore, C and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Examining the roles of regularity and lexical class in
18--26-month-olds' representations of how words
sound},
Year = {2021},
Month = {September},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/kp7tv},
Abstract = {<p>By around 12 months, infants have well-specified phonetic
representations for the nouns they understand, for instance
looking less at a car upon hearing ‘cur’ than ‘car’
(Swingley &amp; Aslin, 2002). Here we test whether such
high-fidelity representations extend to irregular nouns, and
regular and irregular verbs. A corpus analysis confirms the
intuition that irregular verbs are far more common than
irregular nouns in speech to young children. Two eyetracking
experiments then test whether toddlers are sensitive to
mispronunciation inregular and irregular nouns (Experiment
1) and verbs (Experiment 2). For nouns, we find both a
mispronunciation and regularity effect in 18-month-olds. For
verbs, in Experiment 2a, we find only a regularity effect
and no mispronunciation effect in 18-month-olds, though
toddlers’ poor comprehension overall limits
interpretation. Finally, in Experiment 2b we find a
mispronunciation effect and no regularity effect in
26-month-olds. Implications for wordform representations,
lexical class, and learning are discussed.</p>},
Doi = {10.31219/osf.io/kp7tv},
Key = {fds366001}
}
@article{fds355123,
Author = {Cychosz, M and Cristia, A and Bergelson, E and Casillas, M and Baudet,
G and Warlaumont, AS and Scaff, C and Yankowitz, L and Seidl,
A},
Title = {Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic
corpus.},
Journal = {Developmental science},
Volume = {24},
Number = {5},
Pages = {e13090},
Year = {2021},
Month = {September},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/desc.13090},
Abstract = {This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in
similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts.
We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children
(1-36 months) from five different language/cultural
backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings
to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical
transitions or not (e.g., "ba" vs. "ee"). Results revealed
that the proportion of clips reported to contain canonical
transitions increased with age. Furthermore, this proportion
exceeded 0.15 by around 7 months, replicating and extending
previous findings on canonical vocalization development but
using data from the natural environments of a culturally and
linguistically diverse sample. This work explores how
crowdsourcing can be used to annotate corpora, helping
establish developmental milestones relevant to multiple
languages and cultures. Lower inter-annotator reliability on
the crowdsourcing platform, relative to more traditional
in-lab expert annotators, means that a larger number of
unique annotators and/or annotations are required, and that
crowdsourcing may not be a suitable method for more
fine-grained annotation decisions. Audio clips used for this
project are compiled into a large-scale infant vocalization
corpus that is available for other researchers to use in
future work.},
Doi = {10.1111/desc.13090},
Key = {fds355123}
}
@article{fds357623,
Author = {Soderstrom, M and Casillas, M and Bergelson, E and Rosemberg, C and Alam, F and Warlaumont, AS and Bunce, J},
Title = {Developing a Cross-Cultural Annotation System and MetaCorpus
for Studying Infants’ Real World Language
Experience},
Journal = {Collabra: Psychology},
Volume = {7},
Number = {1},
Publisher = {University of California Press},
Year = {2021},
Month = {May},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/collabra.23445},
Abstract = {Recent issues around reproducibility, best practices, and
cultural bias impact naturalistic observational approaches
as much as experimental approaches, but there has been less
focus on this area. Here, we present a new approach that
leverages cross-laboratory collaborative, interdisciplinary
efforts to examine important psychological questions. We
illustrate this approach with a particular project that
examines similarities and differences in children’s early
experiences with language. This project develops a
comprehensive start-to-finish analysis pipeline by
developing a flexible and systematic annotation system, and
implementing this system across a sampling from a
“metacorpus” of audiorecordings of diverse language
communities. This resource is publicly available for use,
sensitive to cultural differences, and flexible to address a
variety of research questions. It is also uniquely suited
for use in the development of tools for automated
analysis.},
Doi = {10.1525/collabra.23445},
Key = {fds357623}
}
@article{fds351271,
Author = {Cristia, A and Lavechin, M and Scaff, C and Soderstrom, M and Rowland,
C and Räsänen, O and Bunce, J and Bergelson, E},
Title = {A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis
(LENA) system.},
Journal = {Behavior research methods},
Volume = {53},
Number = {2},
Pages = {467-486},
Year = {2021},
Month = {April},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01393-5},
Abstract = {In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving
thousands of children across several research disciplines
have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and
automated algorithmic analysis called the LENA<sup>Ⓡ</sup>
system, which aims to assess children's language
environment. While the system's prevalence in the language
acquisition domain is steadily growing, there are only
scattered validation efforts on only some of its key
characteristics. Here, we assess the LENA<sup>Ⓡ</sup>
system's accuracy across all of its key measures: speaker
classification, Child Vocalization Counts (CVC),
Conversational Turn Counts (CTC), and Adult Word Counts
(AWC). Our assessment is based on manual annotation of clips
that have been randomly or periodically sampled out of
daylong recordings, collected from (a) populations similar
to the system's original training data (North American
English-learning children aged 3-36 months), (b) children
learning another dialect of English (UK), and (c) slightly
older children growing up in a different linguistic and
socio-cultural setting (Tsimane' learners in rural Bolivia).
We find reasonably high accuracy in some measures (AWC,
CVC), with more problematic levels of performance in others
(CTC, precision of male adults and other children).
Statistical analyses do not support the view that
performance is worse for children who are dissimilar from
the LENA<sup>Ⓡ</sup> original training set. Whether
LENA<sup>Ⓡ</sup> results are accurate enough for a given
research, educational, or clinical application depends
largely on the specifics at hand. We therefore conclude with
a set of recommendations to help researchers make this
determination for their goals.},
Doi = {10.3758/s13428-020-01393-5},
Key = {fds351271}
}
@article{fds366002,
Author = {Dailey, S and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Language input to infants of different socioeconomic
statuses: A quantitative meta-analysis},
Year = {2021},
Month = {February},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/jvdme},
Abstract = {<p>This Registered Report has been accepted at Developmental
Science.</p>},
Doi = {10.31219/osf.io/jvdme},
Key = {fds366002}
}
@article{fds355371,
Author = {Meylan, SC and Foushee, R and Bergelson, E and Levy,
RP},
Title = {Child-directed Listening: How Caregiver Inference Enables
Children's Early Verbal Communication},
Volume = {abs/2102.03462},
Year = {2021},
Month = {February},
Abstract = {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.},
Key = {fds355371}
}
@article{fds367415,
Author = {Moore, C and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Listeners can use coarticulation cues to predict an upcoming
novel word},
Journal = {Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci
2021},
Pages = {2890-2896},
Year = {2021},
Month = {January},
Abstract = {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 study, 57 adults saw a familiar
object and an unfamiliar object, while hearing sentences
directing their gaze to the target in 3 conditions: with a
familiar word (“crib”), a novel word (“crig”), or a
familiar word with coarticulation cueing a novel word
(“cri(g)b”). When coarticulation cues matched the novel
word (“cri(g)b”), participants looked more at the
unfamiliar object than when the cues matched the familiar
word, suggesting lexical competition can include a novel
word under appropriate circumstances. When hearing a novel
word (e.g. “crig”), participants showed two patterns:
Roughly half looked more at the unfamiliar object, as
expected, while the rest surprisingly looked more at the
familiar object. We discuss the interaction of mutual
exclusivity, phonetic similarity, and coarticulation cues in
driving lexical access.},
Key = {fds367415}
}
@article{fds367416,
Author = {Meylan, SC and Foushee, R and Bergelson, E and Levy,
RP},
Title = {Child-directed Listening: How Caregiver Inference Enables
Children’s Early Verbal Communication},
Journal = {Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci
2021},
Pages = {854-860},
Year = {2021},
Month = {January},
Abstract = {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 child language from the Providence
corpus, 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.},
Key = {fds367416}
}
@article{fds361767,
Author = {Bulgarelli, F and Mielke, J and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Quantifying Talker Variability in North-American Infants'
Daily Input.},
Journal = {Cognitive science},
Volume = {46},
Number = {1},
Pages = {e13075},
Year = {2021},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13075},
Abstract = {Words sound slightly different each time they are said, both
by the same talker and across talkers. Rather than hurting
learning, lab studies suggest that talker variability helps
infants learn similar sounding words. However, very little
is known about how much variability infants hear within a
single talker or across talkers in naturalistic input. Here,
we quantified these types of talker variability for highly
frequent words spoken to 44 infants, from naturalistic
recordings sampled longitudinally over a year of life (from
6 to 17 months). We used non-contrastive acoustic
measurements (e.g., mean pitch, duration,
harmonics-to-noise ratio) and holistic measures of sound
similarity (normalized acoustic distance) to quantify
acoustic variability. We find three key results. First,
pitch-based variability was generally lower for infants' top
talkers than across their other talkers, but overall
acoustic distance is higher for tokens from the top talker
versus the others. Second, the amount of acoustic
variability infants heard could not be predicted from, and
thus was not redundant with, other properties of the input
such as the number of talkers or tokens, or proportion of
speech from particular sources (e.g., women, children,
electronics). Finally, we find that patterns of pitch-based
acoustic variability heard in naturalistic input were
similar to those found with in-lab stimuli that facilitated
word learning. This large-scale quantification of talker
variability in infants' everyday input sets the stage for
linking naturally occurring variability "in the wild" to
early word learning.},
Doi = {10.1111/cogs.13075},
Key = {fds361767}
}
@article{fds356132,
Author = {Meylan, S and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Learning through processing: Towards an integrated approach
to early word learning},
Year = {2021},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4zxfp},
Abstract = {<p>Children's linguistic knowledge and the learning
mechanisms by which they acquire it grow substantially in
infancy and toddlerhood. And yet, theories of word learning
largely fail to incorporate these shifts. Moreover,
researchers' often-siloed focus on either familiar word
recognition or novel word learning limits the critical
consideration of how these two relate. As a step towards a
mechanistic theory of language acquisition, we first present
a framework of "learning through processing," and relate it
to the prevailing methods used to assess children's early
knowledge of words. Incorporating recent empirical work, we
posit a specific, testable timeline of qualitative changes
in the learning process in this interval. Finally, we
conclude with several challenges and avenues for building a
comprehensive theory of early word learning: better
characterization of the input, reconciling results across
approaches, and treating lexical knowledge in the nascent
grammar with sufficient sophistication to ensure
generalizability across languages and development.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/4zxfp},
Key = {fds356132}
}
@article{fds360577,
Author = {Bulgarelli, F and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Talker variability shapes early word representations in
English-learning 8-month-olds},
Year = {2021},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rxyjc},
Abstract = {<p>Infants must form appropriately specific representations
of how words sound, and what they mean. Previous research
suggests that while 8-month-olds are learning words, they
struggle with recognizing different-sounding instances of
words (e.g. from new talkers), and with rejecting incorrect
pronunciations. We asked how adding talker variability
during learning may change infants' ability to learn and
recognize words. Monolingual English-learning
7-to-9-month-olds heard a single novel word paired with an
object in either a 'no variability','within talker
variability' or 'between talker variability' habituation. We
then tested whether infants formed appropriately specific
representations by changing the talker (Experiment 1a) or
mispronouncing the word (Experiment 2), and by changing the
trained word or object altogether (both experiments). Talker
variability influenced learning. Infants trained with no
talker variability learned the word-object link, but failed
to recognize the word trained by a new talker, and were
insensitive to the mispronunciation. Infants trained with
talker variability dishabituated only to the new object,
exhibiting difficulty forming the word-object link. Neither
pattern is adult-like. Results are reported for both in-lab
and Zoom participants. Implications for the role of talker
variability in early word learning are discussed.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/rxyjc},
Key = {fds360577}
}
@article{fds360578,
Author = {Bulgarelli, F and Mielke, J and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Quantifying talker variability in North-American infant's
daily input},
Year = {2021},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2xj36},
Abstract = {<p>Words sound slightly different each time they are said,
both by the same talker and across talkers. Rather than
hurting learning, lab studies suggest that talker
variability helps infants learn similar sounding words.
However, very little is known about how much variability
infants hear within a single talker or across talkers in
naturalistic input. Here, we quantified these types of
talker variability for highly frequent words spoken to 44
infants, from naturalistic recordings sampled longitudinally
over a year of life (from 6-17 months). We used
non-contrastive acoustic measurements (e.g. mean pitch,
duration, harmonics-to-noise ratio) and holistic measures of
sound similarity (normalized acoustic distance) to quantify
acoustic variability. We find three key results. First,
pitch-based variability was generally lower for infants' top
talker than across their other talkers, but overall acoustic
distance is higher for tokens from the top talker versus the
others. Second, the amount of acoustic variability infants
heard could not be predicted from, and thus was not
redundant with, other properties of the input such as number
of talkers or tokens, or proportion of speech from
particular sources (e.g. women, children, electronics).
Finally, we find that patterns of pitch-based acoustic
variability heard in naturalistic input were similar to
those found with in-lab stimuli that facilitated word
learning. This large-scale quantification of talker
variability in infants' everyday input sets the stage for
linking naturally-occurring variability ‘in the wild’ to
early word learning.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/2xj36},
Key = {fds360578}
}
@article{fds363193,
Author = {Liu, J and Hilton, C and Bergelson, E and Mehr, S},
Title = {Language experience predicts music processing in ½ million
speakers of 54 languages},
Year = {2021},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.18.464888},
Abstract = {Tonal languages differ from other languages in their use of
pitch (tones) to distinguish words. Lifelong experience
speaking and hearing tonal languages has been argued to
shape auditory processing in ways that generalize beyond the
perception of linguistic pitch to the perception of pitch in
other domains like music. To examine this, we first
conducted a meta-analysis, finding moderate evidence for
this idea, but in studies strongly limited by mostly small
sample sizes in only a few tonal languages and countries.
This makes it challenging to disentangle the effects of
linguistic experience from variability in music training
experience, cultural differences, and other potential
confounds. To address these issues, we used web-based
citizen science to test this question on a global scale. We
assessed music perception skill in n = 34, 034 native
speakers of 19 tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin, Yoruba) and
compared their performance to n = 459, 066 native speakers
of other languages, including 6 pitch-accented (e.g.,
Japanese) and 29 non-tonal languages (e.g., Hungarian).
Whether or not participants had taken music lessons, native
speakers of all 19 tonal languages had an improved ability
to discriminate musical melodies. But this improvement came
with a trade-off: relative to speakers of pitch-accented or
non-tonal languages, tonal language speakers were also worse
at processing the musical beat. These results, which held
across tonal languages from a variety of geographic regions
and were robust to geographic and demographic variation,
demonstrate that linguistic experience shapes music
perception ability, with implications for relations between
music, language, and culture in the human
mind.},
Doi = {10.1101/2021.10.18.464888},
Key = {fds363193}
}
@article{fds349992,
Author = {Laing, C and Bergelson, E},
Title = {From babble to words: Infants' early productions match words
and objects in their environment.},
Journal = {Cognitive psychology},
Volume = {122},
Pages = {101308},
Year = {2020},
Month = {November},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101308},
Abstract = {Infants' early babbling allows them to engage in
proto-conversations with caretakers, well before clearly
articulated, meaningful words are part of their productive
lexicon. Moreover, the well-rehearsed sounds from babble
serve as a perceptual 'filter', drawing infants' attention
towards words that match the sounds they can reliably
produce. Using naturalistic home recordings of 44
10-11-month-olds (an age with high variability in early
speech sound production), this study tests whether infants'
early consonant productions match words and objects in their
environment. We find that infants' babble matches the
consonants produced in their caregivers' speech. Infants
with a well-established consonant repertoire also match
their babble to objects in their environment. Our findings
show that infants' early consonant productions are shaped by
their input: by 10 months, the sounds of babble match what
infants see and hear.},
Doi = {10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101308},
Key = {fds349992}
}
@article{fds366003,
Author = {Garrison, H and Baudet, G and Breitfeld, E and Aberman, A and Bergelson,
E},
Title = {Familiarity Plays a Small Role in Noun Comprehension at
12-18 months},
Year = {2020},
Month = {October},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/b3pj6},
Abstract = {<p>Infants amass thousands of hours of experience with
particular items, each of which is representative of a
broader category that often shares perceptual features.
Robust word comprehension requires generalizing known labels
to new category members. While young infants have been found
to look at common nouns when they are named aloud, the role
of item familiarity has not been well-examined. This study
compares 12-18-month-olds’ word comprehension in the
context of pairs of their own items (e.g. photos of their
own shoe and ball) versus new tokens from the same category
(e.g. a new shoe and ball). Our results replicate previous
work showing that noun comprehension improves rapidly over
the second year, while also suggesting that item familiarity
appears to play a far smaller role in comprehension in this
age-range. This in turn suggests that even before age two,
ready generalization beyond particular experiences is an
intrinsic component of lexical development.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/b3pj6},
Key = {fds366003}
}
@article{fds350210,
Author = {Bergelson, E},
Title = {The Comprehension Boost in Early Word Learning: Older
Infants Are Better Learners.},
Journal = {Child development perspectives},
Volume = {14},
Number = {3},
Pages = {142-149},
Year = {2020},
Month = {September},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12373},
Abstract = {Recent research has revealed that infants begin
understanding words at around 6 months. After that, infants'
comprehension vocabulary increases gradually in a linear way
over 8-18 months, according to data from parental
checklists. In contrast, infants' word comprehension
improves robustly, qualitatively, and in a nonlinear way
just after their first birthday, according to data from
studies on spoken word comprehension. In this review, I
integrate observational and experimental data to explain
these divergent results. I argue that infants' comprehension
boost is not well-explained by changes in their language
input for common words, but rather by proposing that they
learn to take better advantage of relatively stable input
data. Next, I propose potentially complementary theoretical
accounts of what makes older infants better learners.
Finally, I suggest how the research community can expand our
empirical base in this understudied area, and why doing so
will inform our knowledge about child development.},
Doi = {10.1111/cdep.12373},
Key = {fds350210}
}
@article{fds350533,
Author = {Sheskin, M and Scott, K and Mills, CM and Bergelson, E and Bonawitz, E and Spelke, ES and Fei-Fei, L and Keil, FC and Gweon, H and Tenenbaum, JB and Jara-Ettinger, J and Adolph, KE and Rhodes, M and Frank, MC and Mehr,
SA and Schulz, L},
Title = {Online Developmental Science to Foster Innovation, Access,
and Impact.},
Journal = {Trends in cognitive sciences},
Volume = {24},
Number = {9},
Pages = {675-678},
Year = {2020},
Month = {September},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.004},
Abstract = {We propose that developmental cognitive science should
invest in an online CRADLE, a Collaboration for Reproducible
and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments that crowdsources
data from families participating on the internet. Here, we
discuss how the field can work together to further expand
and unify current prototypes for the benefit of researchers,
science, and society.},
Doi = {10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.004},
Key = {fds350533}
}
@article{fds349386,
Author = {Garrison, H and Baudet, G and Breitfeld, E and Aberman, A and Bergelson,
E},
Title = {Familiarity plays a small role in noun comprehension at
12-18 months.},
Journal = {Infancy : the official journal of the International Society
on Infant Studies},
Volume = {25},
Number = {4},
Pages = {458-477},
Year = {2020},
Month = {July},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/infa.12333},
Abstract = {Infants amass thousands of hours of experience with
particular items, each of which is representative of a
broader category that often shares perceptual features.
Robust word comprehension requires generalizing known labels
to new category members. While young infants have been found
to look at common nouns when they are named aloud, the role
of item familiarity has not been well examined. This study
compares 12- to 18-month-olds' word comprehension in the
context of pairs of their own items (e.g., photographs of
their own shoe and ball) versus new tokens from the same
category (e.g., a new shoe and ball). Our results replicate
previous work showing that noun comprehension improves
rapidly over the second year, while also suggesting that
item familiarity appears to play a far smaller role in
comprehension in this age range. This in turn suggests that
even before age 2, ready generalization beyond particular
experiences is an intrinsic component of lexical
development.},
Doi = {10.1111/infa.12333},
Key = {fds349386}
}
@article{fds366004,
Author = {Laing, C and Bergelson, E},
Title = {From babble to words: Infants’ early productions match
words and objects in their environment},
Year = {2020},
Month = {June},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/wp3n4},
Abstract = {<p>Infants’ early babbling allows them to engage in
proto-conversations with caretakers, well before clearly
articulated, meaningful words are part of their productive
lexicon. Moreover, the well-rehearsed sounds from babble
serve as a perceptual ‘filter’, drawing infants’
attention towards words that match the sounds they can
reliably produce. Using naturalistic home recordings of 44
10-11-month-olds (an age with high variability in early
speech sound production), this study tests whether
infants’ early consonant productions match words and
objects in their environment. We find that infants’ babble
matches the consonants produced in their caregivers’
speech. Infants with a well-established consonant repertoire
also match their babble to objects in their environment. Our
findings show that infants’ early consonant productions
are shaped by their input: by 10 months, the sounds of
babble match what infants see and hear.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/wp3n4},
Key = {fds366004}
}
@article{fds366005,
Author = {Garrison, H and Baudet, G and Breitfeld, E and Aberman, A and Bergelson,
E},
Title = {Familiarity Plays a Small Role in Noun Comprehension at
12-18 months},
Year = {2020},
Month = {April},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sz38y},
Abstract = {<p>Infants amass thousands of hours of experience with
particular items, each of which is representative of a
broader category that often shares perceptual features.
Robust word comprehension requires generalizing known labels
to new category members. While young infants have been found
to look at common nouns when they are named aloud, the role
of item familiarity has not been well-examined. This study
compares 12-18-month-olds’ word comprehension in the
context of pairs of their own items (e.g. photos of their
own shoe and ball) versus new tokens from the same category
(e.g. a new shoe and ball). Our results replicate previous
work showing that noun comprehension improves rapidly over
the second year, while also suggesting that item familiarity
appears to play a far smaller role in comprehension in this
age-range. This in turn suggests that even before age two,
ready generalization beyond particular experiences is an
intrinsic component of lexical development.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/sz38y},
Key = {fds366005}
}
@article{fds345448,
Author = {Bulgarelli, F and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Look who's talking: A comparison of automated and
human-generated speaker tags in naturalistic day-long
recordings.},
Journal = {Behavior research methods},
Volume = {52},
Number = {2},
Pages = {641-653},
Year = {2020},
Month = {April},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01265-7},
Abstract = {The LENA system has revolutionized research on language
acquisition, providing both a wearable device to collect
day-long recordings of children's environments, and a set of
automated outputs that process, identify, and classify
speech using proprietary algorithms. This output includes
information about input sources (e.g., adult male,
electronics). While this system has been tested across a
variety of settings, here we delve deeper into validating
the accuracy and reliability of LENA's automated
diarization, i.e., tags of who is talking. Specifically, we
compare LENA's output with a gold standard set of manually
generated talker tags from a dataset of 88 day-long
recordings, taken from 44 infants at 6 and 7 months, which
includes 57,983 utterances. We compare accuracy across a
range of classifications from the original Lena Technical
Report, alongside a set of analyses examining classification
accuracy by utterance type (e.g., declarative, singing).
Consistent with previous validations, we find overall high
agreement between the human and LENA-generated speaker tags
for adult speech in particular, with poorer performance
identifying child, overlap, noise, and electronic speech
(accuracy range across all measures: 0-92%). We discuss
several clear benefits of using this automated system
alongside potential caveats based on the error patterns we
observe, concluding with implications for research using
LENA-generated speaker tags.},
Doi = {10.3758/s13428-019-01265-7},
Key = {fds345448}
}
@article{fds349427,
Author = {Cristia, A and Bulgarelli, F and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Accuracy of the Language Environment Analysis System
Segmentation and Metrics: A Systematic Review.},
Journal = {Journal of speech, language, and hearing research :
JSLHR},
Volume = {63},
Number = {4},
Pages = {1093-1105},
Year = {2020},
Month = {April},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2020_jslhr-19-00017},
Abstract = {Purpose The Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system
provides automated measures facilitating clinical and
nonclinical research and interventions on language
development, but there are only a few, scattered independent
reports of these measures' validity. The objectives of the
current systematic review were to (a) discover studies
comparing LENA output with manual annotation, namely,
accuracy of talker labels, as well as involving adult word
counts (AWCs), conversational turn counts (CTCs), and child
vocalization counts (CVCs); (b) describe them qualitatively;
(c) quantitatively integrate them to assess central
tendencies; and (d) quantitatively integrate them to assess
potential moderators. Method Searches on Google Scholar,
PubMed, Scopus, and PsycInfo were combined with expert
knowledge, and interarticle citations resulting in 238
records screened and 73 records whose full text was
inspected. To be included, studies must target children
under the age of 18 years and report on accuracy of LENA
labels (e.g., precision and/or recall) and/or AWC, CTC, or
CVC (correlations and/or error metrics). Results A total of
33 studies, in 28 articles, were discovered. A qualitative
review revealed most validation studies had not been peer
reviewed as such and failed to report key methodology and
results. Quantitative integration of the results was
possible for a broad definition of recall and precision
(<i>M</i> = 59% and 68%, respectively; <i>N</i> = 12-13),
for AWC (mean <i>r</i> = .79, <i>N</i> = 13), CVC (mean
<i>r</i> = .77, <i>N</i> = 5), and CTC (mean <i>r</i> = .36,
<i>N</i> = 6). Publication bias and moderators could not be
assessed meta-analytically. Conclusion Further research and
improved reporting are needed in studies evaluating LENA
segmentation and quantification accuracy, with work
investigating CTC being particularly urgent. Supplemental
Material https://osf.io/4nhms/.},
Doi = {10.1044/2020_jslhr-19-00017},
Key = {fds349427}
}
@article{fds359985,
Author = {Frank, MC and Alcock, KJ and Arias-Trejo, N and Aschersleben, G and Baldwin, D and Barbu, S and Bergelson, E and Bergmann, C and Black, AK and Blything, R and Böhland, MP and Bolitho, P and Borovsky, A and Brady,
SM and Braun, B and Brown, A and Byers-Heinlein, K and Campbell, LE and Cashon, C and Choi, M and Christodoulou, J and Cirelli, LK and Conte, S and Cordes, S and Cox, C and Cristia, A and Cusack, R and Davies, C and de
Klerk, M and Delle Luche and C and de Ruiter, L and Dinakar, D and Dixon,
KC and Durier, V and Durrant, S and Fennell, C and Ferguson, B and Ferry,
A and Fikkert, P and Flanagan, T and Floccia, C and Foley, M and Fritzsche,
T and Frost, RLA and Gampe, A and Gervain, J and Gonzalez-Gomez, N and Gupta, A and Hahn, LE and Hamlin, JK and Hannon, EE and Havron, N and Hay,
J and Hernik, M and Höhle, B and Houston, DM and Howard, LH and Ishikawa,
M and Itakura, S and Jackson, I and Jakobsen, KV and Jarto, M and Johnson,
SP and Junge, C and Karadag, D and Kartushina, N and Kellier, DJ and Keren-Portnoy, T and Klassen, K and Kline, M and Ko, ES and Kominsky,
JF and Kosie, JE and Kragness, HE and Krieger, AAR and Krieger, F and Lany,
J and Lazo, RJ and Lee, M and Leservoisier, C and Levelt, C and Lew-Williams, C and Lippold, M and Liszkowski, U and Liu, L and Luke,
SG and Lundwall, RA and Cassia, VM and Mani, N and Marino, C and Martin, A and Mastroberardino, M and Mateu, V and Mayor, J and Menn, K and Michel, C and Moriguchi, Y and Morris, B and Nave, KM and Nazzi,
T},
Title = {Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using
the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference},
Journal = {Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological
Science},
Volume = {3},
Number = {1},
Pages = {24-52},
Publisher = {SAGE Publications},
Year = {2020},
Month = {March},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2515245919900809},
Abstract = {Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned
with issues related to methodology and replicability, and
infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges
related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies
are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across
labs, and different labs have access to different infant
populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a
large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the
overall replicability of a single theoretically important
phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and
developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference
for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech
(ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to
an adult in North American English were created using
seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings.
Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed
across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia,
and Asia using the three common methods for measuring
infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central
fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic
effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval
= [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller
than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous
literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly
stronger in older children, in those children for whom the
stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in
data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure.
Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but
suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development,
native-language experience, and testing procedure.},
Doi = {10.1177/2515245919900809},
Key = {fds359985}
}
@article{fds366006,
Author = {Cristia, A and Lavechin, M and Scaff, C and Soderstrom, M and Rowland,
CF and Räsänen, O and Bunce, JP and Bergelson, E},
Title = {A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis
(LENATM) system},
Year = {2020},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/czbym},
Abstract = {<p>In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving
thousands of children across several research disciplines
have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and
automated algorithmic analysis called the LENA^®^ system,
which aims to assess children's language environment. While
the system's prevalence in the language acquisition domain
is steadily growing, there are only scattered validation
efforts, on only some of its key characteristics. Here, we
assess the LENA^®^ system's accuracy across all of its key
measures: speaker classification, Child Vocalization Counts
(CVC), Conversational Turn Counts (CTC), and Adult Word
Counts (AWC). Our assessment is based on manual annotation
of clips that have been randomly or periodically sampled out
of daylong recordings, collected from (a) populations
similar to the system's original training data (North
American English-learning children aged 3-36 months), (b)
children learning another dialect of English (UK), and (c)
slightly older children growing up in a different linguistic
and socio-cultural setting (Tsimane' learners in rural
Bolivia). We find reasonably high accuracy in some measures
(AWC, CVC), with more problematic levels of performance in
others (CTC, precision of male adults and other children).
Statistical analyses do not support the view that
performance is worse for children who are dissimilar from
the LENA^®^ original training set. Whether LENA^®^ results
are accurate enough for a given research, educational, or
clinical application depends largely on the specifics at
hand. We therefore conclude with a set of recommendations to
help researchers make this determination for their
goals.</p>},
Doi = {10.31219/osf.io/czbym},
Key = {fds366006}
}
@article{fds355372,
Author = {Meylan, SC and Levy, RP and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Children's Expressive and Receptive Knowledge of the English
Regular Plural},
Journal = {Proceedings for the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society: Developing a Mind: Learning in Humans,
Animals, and Machines, CogSci 2020},
Pages = {2270-2276},
Publisher = {cognitivesciencesociety.org},
Editor = {Denison, S and Mack, M and Xu, Y and Armstrong, BC},
Year = {2020},
Month = {January},
Abstract = {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 well before 24
months. At the same time, children use the plural
inconsistently with familiar object words, and demonstrate
limited receptive knowledge of the plural in the absence of
supporting linguistic features. In the first study to test
knowledge of the plural within participants using a paradigm
matched across comprehension and production, we conduct two
experiments with n = 52 24-36-month-olds: an eyetracking
task to evaluate what they understand, and a storybook task
to test how they use the plural. We manipulate both novelty
(novel vs. familiar object words) and phonological form (/s/
vs. /z/ plurals). We find strong, age-related evidence of
productive knowledge of the plural in an expressive task,
but do not find evidence of receptive knowledge in these
same children.},
Key = {fds355372}
}
@article{fds357503,
Author = {Soderstrom, M and Casillas, M and Bergelson, E and Rosemberg, CR and alam, F and Warlaumont, A and Bunce, J},
Title = {Developing A Cross-Cultural Annotation System and MetaCorpus
for Studying Infants’ Real World Language
Experience},
Year = {2020},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bf63y},
Abstract = {<p>Recent issues around reproducibility, best practices, and
cultural bias impact naturalistic observational approaches
as much as experimental approaches, but there has been less
focus on this area. Here, we present a new approach that
leverages cross-laboratory collaborative, interdisciplinary
efforts to examine important psychological questions. We
illustrate this approach with a particular project that
examines similarities and differences in children’s early
experiences with language. This project develops a
comprehensive start-to-finish analysis pipeline by
developing a flexible and systematic annotation system, and
implementing this system across a sampling from a
“metacorpus” of audiorecordings of diverse language
communities. This resource is publicly available for use,
sensitive to cultural differences, and flexible to address a
variety of research questions. It is also uniquely suited
for use in the development of tools for automated
analysis.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/bf63y},
Key = {fds357503}
}
@article{fds357504,
Author = {Bunce, J and Soderstrom, M and Bergelson, E and Rosemberg, CR and Stein,
A and alam, F and Migdalek, M and Casillas, M},
Title = {A cross-cultural examination of young children’s everyday
language experiences},
Year = {2020},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/723pr},
Abstract = {<p>We present an exploratory cross-cultural analysis of the
quantity of target-child-directed speech and adult-directed
speech to young children learning North American English (US
& Canadian), United Kingdom English, Argentinian
Spanish, Tseltal (Tenejapa, Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (Rossel
Island, Papuan), using annotations from 69 children aged
2–36 months. Using a novel methodological approach, our
cross-cultural findings support prior work suggesting that
target-child-directed speech quantities are stable across
early development, while adult-directed speech decreases. A
preponderance of speech from women was found to a similar
degree across groups, with less target-child-directed speech
from men and children in the North American samples than
elsewhere. Consistently across groups, children also heard
more adult-directed than target-child-directed speech.
Finally, the numbers of talkers present at any given moment
strongly impacted children’s moment-to-moment input
quantities. These findings illustrate how the structure of
home life impacts patterns of early language exposure across
diverse societies.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/723pr},
Key = {fds357504}
}
@article{fds366007,
Author = {Cristia, A and Bulgarelli, F and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Accuracy of the Language Environment Analysis (LENATM)
System Segmentation and Metrics: A Systematic
Review},
Year = {2019},
Month = {October},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/fhs57},
Abstract = {<p>Purpose: The Language Environment Analysis (LENATM)
system provides automated measures facilitating clinical and
non-clinical research and interventions on language
development, but there are only a few, scattered independent
reports of these measures’ validity. The objectives of the
current systematic review were to (1) Discover studies
comparing LENATM output with manual annotation, namely
accuracy of talker labels, as well as involving Adult Word
Counts (AWC), Conversational Turn Counts (CTC), and Child
Vocalization Counts (CVC); (2) Describe them qualitatively;
(3) Quantitatively integrate them to assess central
tendencies; and (4) Quantitatively integrate them to assess
potential moderators. Method: Searches on Google Scholar,
PubMed, Scopus, and PsycInfo were combined with expert
knowledge, and inter-article citations resulting in 238
records screened, and 73 records whose full-text was
inspected. To be included, studies must target children
under age 18 years and report on accuracy of LENATM labels
(e.g., precision and/or recall), and/or AWC, CTC, or CVC
(correlations and/or error metrics). Results: A total of 33
studies, in 28 articles, were discovered. A qualitative
review revealed most validation studies had not been
peer-reviewed as such and failed to report key methodology
and results. Quantitative integration of the results was
possible for a broad definition of recall and precision
(mean = 59% and 68% respectively, N = 12-13), for AWC (mean
r = .79, N = 13), CVC (mean r = .77, N = 5), and CTC (mean r
= .36, N = 6). Publication bias and moderators could not be
assessed meta-analytically. Conclusion: Further research and
improved reporting are needed in studies evaluating LENA
segmentation and quantification accuracy, with work
investigating CTC being particularly urgent.</p>},
Doi = {10.31219/osf.io/fhs57},
Key = {fds366007}
}
@article{fds345888,
Author = {Räsänen, O and Seshadri, S and Karadayi, J and Riebling, E and Bunce,
J and Cristia, A and Metze, F and Casillas, M and Rosemberg, C and Bergelson, E and Soderstrom, M},
Title = {Automatic word count estimation from daylong child-centered
recordings in various language environments using
language-independent syllabification of speech},
Journal = {Speech Communication},
Volume = {113},
Pages = {63-80},
Year = {2019},
Month = {October},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2019.08.005},
Abstract = {Automatic word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings
can be used to quantify the amount of verbal communication
in a recording environment. One key application of WCE is to
measure language input heard by infants and toddlers in
their natural environments, as captured by daylong
recordings from microphones worn by the infants. Although
WCE is nearly trivial for high-quality signals in
high-resource languages, daylong recordings are
substantially more challenging due to the unconstrained
acoustic environments and the presence of near- and
far-field speech. Moreover, many use cases of interest
involve languages for which reliable ASR systems or even
well-defined lexicons are not available. A good WCE system
should also perform similarly for low- and high-resource
languages in order to enable unbiased comparisons across
different cultures and environments. Unfortunately, the
current state-of-the-art solution, the LENA system, is based
on proprietary software and has only been optimized for
American English, limiting its applicability. In this paper,
we build on existing work on WCE and present the steps we
have taken towards a freely available system for WCE that
can be adapted to different languages or dialects with a
limited amount of orthographically transcribed speech data.
Our system is based on language-independent syllabification
of speech, followed by a language-dependent mapping from
syllable counts (and a number of other acoustic features) to
the corresponding word count estimates. We evaluate our
system on samples from daylong infant recordings from six
different corpora consisting of several languages and
socioeconomic environments, all manually annotated with the
same protocol to allow direct comparison. We compare a
number of alternative techniques for the two key components
in our system: speech activity detection and automatic
syllabification of speech. As a result, we show that our
system can reach relatively consistent WCE accuracy across
multiple corpora and languages (with some limitations). In
addition, the system outperforms LENA on three of the four
corpora consisting of different varieties of English. We
also demonstrate how an automatic neural network-based
syllabifier, when trained on multiple languages, generalizes
well to novel languages beyond the training data,
outperforming two previously proposed unsupervised
syllabifiers as a feature extractor for WCE.},
Doi = {10.1016/j.specom.2019.08.005},
Key = {fds345888}
}
@article{fds343464,
Author = {Moore, C and Dailey, S and Garrison, H and Amatuni, A and Bergelson,
E},
Title = {Point, walk, talk: Links between three early milestones,
from observation and parental report.},
Journal = {Developmental psychology},
Volume = {55},
Number = {8},
Pages = {1579-1593},
Year = {2019},
Month = {August},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000738},
Abstract = {Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk,
and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by
researchers with strictly standardized criteria and
caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these
skills entails. Here, we compare the onsets of these skills
and links among them across two data collection methods:
observation and parental report. We examine pointing,
walking, and talking in a sample of 44 infants studied
longitudinally from 6 to 18 months. In this sample, links
between pointing and vocabulary were tighter than those
between walking and vocabulary, supporting a unified
sociocommunicative growth account. Indeed, across several
cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, pointers had
larger vocabularies than their nonpointing peers. In
contrast to previous work, this did not hold for walkers'
versus crawlers' vocabularies in our sample. Comparing
across data sources, we find that reported and observed
estimates of the growing vocabulary and of age of walk onset
were closely correlated, while agreement between parents and
researchers on pointing onset and talking onset was weaker.
Taken together, these results support a developmental
account in which gesture and language are intertwined
aspects of early communication and symbolic thinking,
whereas the shift from crawling to walking appears
indistinct from age in its relation with language. We
conclude that pointing, walking, and talking are on similar
timelines yet distinct from one another, and discuss
methodological and theoretical implications in the context
of early development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019
APA, all rights reserved).},
Doi = {10.1037/dev0000738},
Key = {fds343464}
}
@article{fds366580,
Author = {Cristia, A and Lavechin, M and Scaff, C and Soderstrom, M and Rowland,
CF and Räsänen, O and Bunce, JP and Bergelson, E},
Title = {A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis
(LENATM) system},
Year = {2019},
Month = {August},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/mxr8s},
Abstract = {<p>In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving
thousands of children across several research disciplines
have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and
automated algorithmic analysis called the LENA^®^ system,
which aims to assess children's language environment. While
the system's prevalence in the language acquisition domain
is steadily growing, there are only scattered validation
efforts, on only some of its key characteristics. Here, we
assess the LENA^®^ system's accuracy across all of its key
measures: speaker classification, Child Vocalization Counts
(CVC), Conversational Turn Counts (CTC), and Adult Word
Counts (AWC). Our assessment is based on manual annotation
of clips that have been randomly or periodically sampled out
of daylong recordings, collected from (a) populations
similar to the system's original training data (North
American English-learning children aged 3-36 months), (b)
children learning another dialect of English (UK), and (c)
slightly older children growing up in a different linguistic
and socio-cultural setting (Tsimane' learners in rural
Bolivia). We find reasonably high accuracy in some measures
(AWC, CVC), with more problematic levels of performance in
others (CTC, precision of male adults and other children).
Statistical analyses do not support the view that
performance is worse for children who are dissimilar from
the LENA^®^ original training set. Whether LENA^®^ results
are accurate enough for a given research, educational, or
clinical application depends largely on the specifics at
hand. We therefore conclude with a set of recommendations to
help researchers make this determination for their
goals.</p>},
Doi = {10.31219/osf.io/mxr8s},
Key = {fds366580}
}
@article{fds366581,
Author = {Moore, C and Dailey, S and Garrison, H and Amatuni, A and Bergelson,
E},
Title = {Point, Walk, Talk: Links Between Three Early Milestones,
from Observation and Parental Report},
Year = {2019},
Month = {May},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/g6q5u},
Abstract = {<p>Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point,
walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by
researchers with strictly standardized criteria and
caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these
skills entails. Here we compare the onsets of these skills
and links among them across two data collection methods:
observation and parental report. We examine pointing,
walking, and talking in a sample of 44 infants studied
longitudinally from 6–18 months. In this sample, links
between pointing and vocabulary were tighter than those
between walking and vocabulary, supporting a unified
socio-communicative growth account. Indeed, across several
cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, pointers had
larger vocabularies than their non-pointing peers. In
contrast to previous work, this did not hold for walkers’
vs. crawlers’ vocabularies in our sample. Comparing across
data sources, we find that reported and observed estimates
of the growing vocabulary and of age of walk onset were
closely correlated, while agreement between parents and
researchers on pointing onset and talking onset was weaker.
Taken together, these results support a developmental
account in which gesture and language are intertwined
aspects of early communication and symbolic thinking,
whereas the shift from crawling to walking appears
indistinct from age in its relation with language. We
conclude that pointing, walking, and talking are on similar
timelines yet distinct from one another, and discuss
methodological and theoretical implications in the context
of early development.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/g6q5u},
Key = {fds366581}
}
@article{fds366582,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Casillas, M and Soderstrom, M and Seidl, A and Warlaumont, AS and Amatuni, A},
Title = {Inside Front Cover: Cover Image, Volume 22, Issue
1},
Journal = {Developmental Science},
Volume = {22},
Number = {1},
Pages = {e12785-e12785},
Publisher = {Wiley},
Year = {2019},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/desc.12785},
Doi = {10.1111/desc.12785},
Key = {fds366582}
}
@article{fds347108,
Author = {Schuller, BW and Batliner, A and Bergler, C and Pokorny, FB and Krajewski, J and Cychosz, M and Vollmann, R and Roelen, SD and Schnieder, S and Bergelson, E and Cristia, A and Seidl, A and Warlaumont, AS and Yankowitz, L and Nöth, E and Amiriparian, S and Hantke, S and Schmitt, M},
Title = {The INTERSPEECH 2019 computational paralinguistics
challenge: Styrian dialects, continuous sleepiness, baby
sounds & Orca activity},
Journal = {Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International
Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH},
Volume = {2019-September},
Pages = {2378-2382},
Year = {2019},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1122},
Abstract = {The INTERSPEECH 2019 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge
addresses four different problems for the first time in a
research competition under well-defined conditions: In the
Styrian Dialects Sub-Challenge, three types of
Austrian-German dialects have to be classified; in the
Continuous Sleepiness Sub-Challenge, the sleepiness of a
speaker has to be assessed as regression problem; in the
Baby Sound Sub-Challenge, five types of infant sounds have
to be classified; and in the Orca Activity Sub-Challenge,
orca sounds have to be detected. We describe the
Sub-Challenges and baseline feature extraction and
classifiers, which include data-learnt (supervised) feature
representations by the 'usual' ComParE and BoAW features,
and deep unsupervised representation learning using the
AUDEEP toolkit.},
Doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1122},
Key = {fds347108}
}
@article{fds355373,
Author = {Bunce, J and Bergelson, E and Warlaumont, A and Casillas,
M},
Title = {Daylong data: Raw audio to transcript via automated &
manual open-science tools},
Journal = {Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation,
CogSci 2019},
Pages = {15-16},
Publisher = {cognitivesciencesociety.org},
Editor = {Goel, AK and Seifert, CM and Freksa, C},
Year = {2019},
Month = {January},
ISBN = {9780991196777},
Abstract = {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 out of them is a more
daunting task. Across four mini-sessions, this tutorial aims
to address pre- and post-data collection concerns, and
provide a hands-on introduction to manual and automated
annotation techniques. Attendees will leave this tutorial
with resources and concrete experience for collecting,
annotating, and sharing/archiving naturalistic recordings,
including specific open-science practices relevant for these
data.},
Key = {fds355373}
}
@article{fds337129,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Amatuni, A and Dailey, S and Koorathota, S and Tor,
S},
Title = {Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to
infants.},
Journal = {Developmental science},
Volume = {22},
Number = {1},
Pages = {e12715},
Year = {2019},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/desc.12715},
Abstract = {Measurements of infants' quotidian experiences provide
critical information about early development. However, the
role of sampling methods in providing these measurements is
rarely examined. Here we directly compare language input
from hour-long video-recordings and daylong audio-recordings
within the same group of 44 infants at 6 and 7 months. We
compared 12 measures of language quantity and lexical
diversity, talker variability, utterance-type, and object
presence, finding moderate correlations across
recording-types. However, video-recordings generally
featured far denser noun input across these measures
compared to the daylong audio-recordings, more akin to
'peak' audio hours (though not as high in talkers and
word-types). Although audio-recordings captured ~10 times
more awake-time than videos, the noun input in them was only
2-4 times greater. Notably, whether we compared videos to
daylong audio-recordings or peak audio times, videos
featured relatively fewer declaratives and more questions;
furthermore, the most common video-recorded nouns were less
consistent across families than the top audio-recording
nouns were. Thus, hour-long videos and daylong
audio-recordings revealed fairly divergent pictures of the
language infants hear and learn from in their daily lives.
We suggest that short video-recordings provide a dense and
somewhat different sample of infants' language experiences,
rather than a typical one, and should be used cautiously for
extrapolation about common words, talkers, utterance-types,
and contexts at larger timescales. If theories of language
development are to be held accountable to 'facts on the
ground' from observational data, greater care is needed to
unpack the ramifications of sampling methods of early
language input.},
Doi = {10.1111/desc.12715},
Key = {fds337129}
}
@article{fds338532,
Author = {Laing, CE and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Mothers' Work Status and 17-month-olds' Productive
Vocabulary.},
Journal = {Infancy : the official journal of the International Society
on Infant Studies},
Volume = {24},
Number = {1},
Pages = {101-109},
Publisher = {WILEY},
Year = {2019},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/infa.12265},
Abstract = {Literature examining the effects of mothers' work status on
infant language development is mixed, with little focus on
varying work-schedules and early vocabulary. We use
naturalistic data to analyze the productive vocabulary of 44
17-month-olds in relation to mothers' work status
(Full-time, Part-time, Stay-at-home) at 6 and 18 months.
Infants who experienced a combination of care from mothers
and other caretakers had larger productive vocabularies than
infants in solely full-time maternal or solely
other-caretaker care. Our results draw from naturalistic
data to suggest that this care combination may be
particularly beneficial for early lexical
development.},
Doi = {10.1111/infa.12265},
Key = {fds338532}
}
@article{fds339362,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Casillas, M and Soderstrom, M and Seidl, A and Warlaumont, AS and Amatuni, A},
Title = {What Do North American Babies Hear? A large-scale
cross-corpus analysis.},
Journal = {Developmental science},
Volume = {22},
Number = {1},
Pages = {e12724},
Year = {2019},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/desc.12724},
Abstract = {A range of demographic variables influences how much speech
young children hear. However, because studies have used
vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison
of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly
impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique
collection of existing naturalistic, day-long recordings
from 61 homes across four North American cities to examine
language input as a function of age, gender, and maternal
education. We analyzed adult speech heard by 3- to
20-month-olds who wore audio recorders for an entire day. We
annotated speaker gender and speech register (child-directed
or adult-directed) for 10,861 utterances from female and
male adults in these recordings. Examining age, gender, and
maternal education collectively in this ecologically valid
dataset, we find several key results. First, the speaker
gender imbalance in the input is striking: children heard
2-3× more speech from females than males. Second, children
in higher-maternal education homes heard more child-directed
speech than those in lower-maternal education homes.
Finally, our analyses revealed a previously unreported
effect: the proportion of child-directed speech in the input
increases with age, due to a decrease in adult-directed
speech with age. This large-scale analysis is an important
step forward in collectively examining demographic variables
that influence early development, made possible by pooled,
comparable, day-long recordings of children's language
environments. The audio recordings, annotations, and
annotation software are readily available for reuse and
reanalysis by other researchers.},
Doi = {10.1111/desc.12724},
Key = {fds339362}
}
@article{fds357505,
Author = {Cychosz, M and Cristia, A and Bergelson, E and Casillas, M and Baudet,
G and Warlaumont, A and Scaff, C and Yankowitz, L and Seidl,
A},
Title = {Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic
corpus},
Year = {2019},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/9vzs5},
Abstract = {<p>This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop
in similar ways in children across diverse cultural
contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio-recordings of
49 children (1-36 months) from five different
language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated
these recordings to determine if child vocalizations
contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., "ba'' versus
"ee''). Results revealed that the proportion of clips
reported to contain canonical transitions increased with
age. Further, this proportion exceeded 0.15 by around 7
months, replicating and extending previous findings on
canonical vocalization development but using data from the
natural environments of a culturally and linguistically
diverse sample. This work explores how crowdsourcing can be
used to annotate corpora, helping establish developmental
milestones relevant to multiple languages and cultures.
Lower inter-annotator reliability on the crowdsourcing
platform, relative to more traditional in-lab expert
annotators, means that a larger number of unique annotators
and/or annotations are required and that crowdsourcing may
not be a suitable method for more fine-grained annotation
decisions. Audio clips used for this project are compiled
into a large-scale infant vocal corpus that is available for
other researchers to use in future work.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/9vzs5},
Key = {fds357505}
}
@article{fds357506,
Author = {Räsänen, O and Seshadri, S and karadayi, J and Riebling, E and Bunce,
J and Cristia, A and metze, F and Casillas, M and Rosemberg, CR and Bergelson, E and Soderstrom, M},
Title = {Automatic word count estimation from daylong child-centered
recordings in various language environments using
language-independent syllabification of speech},
Year = {2019},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xp6k2},
Abstract = {<p>Automatic word count estimation (WCE) from audio
recordings can be used to quantify the amount of verbal
communication in a recording environment. One key
application of WCE is to measure language input heard by
infants and toddlers in their natural environments, as
captured by daylong recordings from microphones worn by the
infants. Although WCE is nearly trivial for high-quality
signals in high-resource languages, daylong recordings are
substantially more challenging due to the unconstrained
acoustic environments and the presence of near- and
far-field speech. Moreover, many use cases of interest
involve languages for which reliable ASR systems or even
well-defined lexicons are not available. A good WCE system
should also perform similarly for low- and high-resource
languages in order to enable unbiased comparisons across
different cultures and environments. Unfortunately, the
current state-of- the-art solution, the LENA system, is
based on proprietary software and has only been optimized
for American English, limiting its applicability. In this
paper, we build on existing work on WCE and present the
steps we have taken towards a freely available system for
WCE that can be adapted to different languages or dialects
with a limited amount of orthographically transcribed speech
data. Our system is based on language-independent
syllabification of speech, followed by a language-dependent
mapping from syllable counts (and a number of other acoustic
features) to the corresponding word count estimates. We
evaluate our system on samples from daylong infant
recordings from six different corpora consisting of several
languages and socioeconomic environments, all manually
annotated with the same protocol to allow direct comparison.
We compare a number of alternative techniques for the two
key components in our system: speech activity detection and
automatic syllabification of speech. As a result, we show
that our system can reach relatively consistent WCE accuracy
across multiple corpora and languages (with some
limitations). In addition, the system outperforms LENA on
three of the four corpora consisting of different varieties
of English. We also demonstrate how an automatic neural
network-based syllabifier, when trained on multiple
languages, generalizes well to novel languages beyond the
training data, outperforming two previously proposed
unsupervised syllabifiers as a feature extractor for
WCE.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/xp6k2},
Key = {fds357506}
}
@article{fds338184,
Author = {Ryanta, N and Bergelson, E and Church, K and Cristia, A and Du, J and Ganapathy, S and Khudanpur, S and Kowalski, D and Krishnamoorthy, M and Kulshreshta, R and Liberman, M and Lu, YD and Maciejewski, M and Metze,
F and Profant, J and Sun, L and Tsao, Y and Yu, Z},
Title = {Enhancement and analysis of conversational speech: JSALT
2017},
Journal = {ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech
and Signal Processing - Proceedings},
Volume = {2018-April},
Pages = {5154-5158},
Publisher = {IEEE},
Year = {2018},
Month = {September},
ISBN = {9781538646588},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2018.8462468},
Abstract = {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 is key to processing meeting audio
and clinical interviews, extended recordings such as police
body cam or child language acquisition data, and any other
speech data involving multiple speakers whose voices are not
cleanly separated into individual channels. Overlapping
speech, environmental noise and suboptimal recording
techniques make the problem harder. During the JSALT Summer
Workshop at CMU in 2017, an international team of
researchers worked on several aspects of this problem,
including calibration of the state of the art, detection of
overlaps, enhancement of noisy recordings, and
classification of shorter speech segments. This paper
sketches the workshop's results, and announces plans for a
'Diarization Challenge' to encourage further
progress.},
Doi = {10.1109/ICASSP.2018.8462468},
Key = {fds338184}
}
@article{fds327239,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Swingley, D},
Title = {Young Infants' Word Comprehension Given An Unfamiliar Talker
or Altered Pronunciations.},
Journal = {Child development},
Volume = {89},
Number = {5},
Pages = {1567-1576},
Year = {2018},
Month = {September},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12888},
Abstract = {To understand spoken words, listeners must appropriately
interpret co-occurring talker characteristics and speech
sound content. This ability was tested in 6- to
14-months-olds by measuring their looking to named food and
body part images. In the new talker condition (n = 90),
pictures were named by an unfamiliar voice; in the
mispronunciation condition (n = 98), infants' mothers
"mispronounced" the words (e.g., nazz for nose). Six- to
7-month-olds fixated target images above chance across
conditions, understanding novel talkers, and mothers'
phonologically deviant speech equally. Eleven- to
14-months-olds also understood new talkers, but performed
poorly with mispronounced speech, indicating sensitivity to
phonological deviation. Between these ages, performance was
mixed. These findings highlight the changing roles of
acoustic and phonetic variability in early word
comprehension, as infants learn which variations alter
meaning.},
Doi = {10.1111/cdev.12888},
Key = {fds327239}
}
@article{fds333673,
Author = {Amatuni, A and He, E and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Preserved Structure Across Vector Space Representations},
Volume = {abs/1802.00840},
Year = {2018},
Month = {February},
Abstract = {Certain concepts, words, and images are intuitively more
similar than others (dog vs. cat, dog vs. spoon), though
quantifying such similarity is notoriously difficult.
Indeed, this kind of computation is likely a critical part
of learning the category boundaries for words within a given
language. Here, we use a set of 27 items (e.g. 'dog') that
are highly common in infants' input, and use both image- and
word-based algorithms to independently compute similarity
among them. We find three key results. First, the pairwise
item similarities derived within image-space and word-space
are correlated, suggesting preserved structure among these
extremely different representational formats. Second, the
closest 'neighbors' for each item, within each space, showed
significant overlap (e.g. both found 'egg' as a neighbor of
'apple'). Third, items with the most overlapping neighbors
are later-learned by infants and toddlers. We conclude that
this approach, which does not rely on human ratings of
similarity, may nevertheless reflect stable within-class
structure across these two spaces. We speculate that such
invariance might aid lexical acquisition, by serving as an
informative marker of category boundaries.},
Key = {fds333673}
}
@article{fds366583,
Author = {Amatuni, A and He, E and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Preserved Structure Across Vector Space Representations},
Journal = {Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society, CogSci 2018},
Pages = {1298-1303},
Publisher = {cognitivesciencesociety.org},
Editor = {Kalish, C and Rau, MA and Zhu, XJ and Rogers, TT},
Year = {2018},
Month = {January},
ISBN = {9780991196784},
Abstract = {Certain concepts, words, and images are intuitively more
similar than others (dog vs. cat, dog vs. spoon), though
quantifying such similarity is notoriously difficult.
Indeed, this kind of computation is likely a critical part
of learning the category boundaries for words within a given
language. Here, we use a set of 27 items (e.g. 'dog') that
are highly common in infants' input, and use both image- and
word-based algorithms to independently compute similarity
among them. We find three key results. First, the pairwise
item similarities derived within image-space and word-space
are correlated, suggesting preserved structure among these
extremely different representational formats. Second, the
closest 'neighbors' for each item, within each space, showed
significant overlap (e.g. both found 'egg' as a neighbor of
'apple'). Third, items with the most overlapping neighbors
are later-learned by infants and toddlers. We conclude that
this approach, which does not rely on human ratings of
similarity, may nevertheless reflect stable within-class
structure across these two spaces. We speculate that such
invariance might aid lexical acquisition, by serving as an
informative marker of category boundaries.},
Key = {fds366583}
}
@article{fds330846,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Aslin, RN},
Title = {Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds.},
Journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America},
Volume = {114},
Number = {49},
Pages = {12916-12921},
Year = {2017},
Month = {December},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1712966114},
Abstract = {Recent research reported the surprising finding that even
6-mo-olds understand common nouns [Bergelson E, Swingley D
(2012) <i>Proc Natl Acad Sci USA</i> 109:3253-3258].
However, is their early lexicon structured and acquired like
older learners? We test 6-mo-olds for a hallmark of the
mature lexicon: cross-word relations. We also examine
whether properties of the home environment that have been
linked with lexical knowledge in older children are
detectable in the initial stage of comprehension. We use a
new dataset, which includes in-lab comprehension and home
measures from the same infants. We find evidence for
cross-word structure: On seeing two images of common nouns,
infants looked significantly more at named target images
when the competitor images were semantically unrelated
(e.g., milk and foot) than when they were related (e.g.,
milk and juice), just as older learners do. We further find
initial evidence for home-lab links: common noun
"copresence" (i.e., whether words' referents were present
and attended to in home recordings) correlated with in-lab
comprehension. These findings suggest that, even in neophyte
word learners, cross-word relations are formed early and the
home learning environment measurably helps shape the lexicon
from the outset.},
Doi = {10.1073/pnas.1712966114},
Key = {fds330846}
}
@article{fds325486,
Author = {Frank, MC and Bergelson, E and Bergmann, C and Cristia, A and Floccia,
C and Gervain, J and Hamlin, JK and Hannon, EE and Kline, M and Levelt, C and Lew-Williams, C and Nazzi, T and Panneton, R and Rabagliati, H and Soderstrom, M and Sullivan, J and Waxman, S and Yurovsky,
D},
Title = {A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting
Reproducibility, Best Practices, and Theory-Building.},
Journal = {Infancy : the official journal of the International Society
on Infant Studies},
Volume = {22},
Number = {4},
Pages = {421-435},
Publisher = {WILEY},
Year = {2017},
Month = {July},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/infa.12182},
Abstract = {The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate
measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent
discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether
psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental
research-especially with infant participants-also has
discipline-specific replicability challenges, including
small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by
collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social
psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and
promoting replicability in infancy research: large-scale,
multi-laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more
precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The
ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will
not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these
phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into
how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and
measurement methods. This project has the potential for a
variety of positive outcomes, including less-biased
estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of
variability that can be used for later study planning, and a
series of best-practices blueprints for future infancy
research.},
Doi = {10.1111/infa.12182},
Key = {fds325486}
}
@article{fds366584,
Author = {Frank, MC and Bergmann, C and Bergelson, E and Byers-Heinlein, K and Cristia, A and Cusack, R and Dyck, K and floccia, C and Gervain, J and Gonzalez, N and Hamlin, K and Hannon, E and Kellier, D and Kline Struhl,
M and Lew-Williams, C and Nazzi, T and Panneton, R and Rabagliati, H and Rennels, J and Seidl, A and Yurovsky, D and Soderstrom,
M},
Title = {Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using
the infant-directed speech preference},
Year = {2017},
Month = {April},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/s98ab},
Abstract = {<p>The field of psychology has become increasingly concerned
with issues related to methodology and replicability.
Infancy researchers face specific challenges related to
replicability: high-powered studies are difficult to
conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different
labs have access to different infant populations, amongst
other factors. Addressing these concerns, we report on a
large-scale, multi-site study aimed at 1) assessing the
overall replicability of a single theoretically-important
phenomenon and 2) examining methodological, situational,
cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on
infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over
adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to
their infants and to an adult were created using
semi-naturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings in North
American English. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and
ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America,
Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three commonly-used
infant discrimination methods (head-turn preference, central
fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic
effect size (Cohen’s *d*) was 0.35 [0.29 - 0.42], which
was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic
mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS
preference was significantly stronger in older children, in
those children for whom the stimuli matched their native
language and dialect, and in data from labs using the
head-turn preference procedure. Together these findings
replicate the infant-directed speech preference but suggest
that its magnitude is modulated by development, native
language experience, and testing procedure.</p>},
Doi = {10.31234/osf.io/s98ab},
Key = {fds366584}
}
@article{fds332031,
Author = {Casillas, M and Amatuni, A and Seidl, A and Soderstrom, M and Warlaumont, AS and Bergelson, E},
Title = {What do babies hear? Analyses of child-and adult-directed
speech},
Journal = {Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International
Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH},
Volume = {2017-August},
Pages = {2093-2097},
Publisher = {ISCA},
Year = {2017},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1409},
Abstract = {Child-directed speech is argued to facilitate language
development, and is found cross-linguistically and
cross-culturally to varying degrees. However, previous
research has generally focused on short samples of
child-caregiver interaction, often in the lab or with
experimenters present. We test the generalizability of this
phenomenon with an initial descriptive analysis of the
speech heard by young children in a large, unique collection
of naturalistic, daylong home recordings. Trained annotators
coded automatically-detected adult speech 'utterances' from
61 homes across 4 North American cities, gathered from
children (age 2-24 months) wearing audio recorders during a
typical day. Coders marked the speaker gender (male/female)
and intended addressee (child/adult), yielding 10,886
addressee and gender tags from 2,523 minutes of audio (cf.
HB-CHAAC Interspeech ComParE challenge; Schuller et al., in
press). Automated speaker-diarization (LENA) incorrectly
gender-Tagged 30% of male adult utterances, compared to
manually-coded consensus. Furthermore, we find effects of
SES and gender on child-directed and overall speech,
increasing child-directed speech with child age, and
interactions of speaker gender, child gender, and child age:
female caretakers increased their childdirected speech more
with age than male caretakers did, but only for male
infants. Implications for language acquisition and existing
classification algorithms are discussed.},
Doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1409},
Key = {fds332031}
}
@article{fds332032,
Author = {Casillas, M and Bergelson, E and Warlaumont, AS and Cristia, A and Soderstrom, M and VanDam, M and Sloetjes, H},
Title = {A new workflow for semi-Automatized annotations: Tests with
long-form naturalistic recordings of childrens language
environments},
Journal = {Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International
Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH},
Volume = {2017-August},
Pages = {2098-2102},
Publisher = {ISCA},
Year = {2017},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1418},
Abstract = {Interoperable annotation formats are fundamental to the
utility, expansion, and sustainability of collective data
repositories. In language development research, shared
annotation schemes have been critical to facilitating the
transition from raw acoustic data to searchable, structured
corpora. Current schemes typically require comprehensive and
manual annotation of utterance boundaries and orthographic
speech content, with an additional, optional range of tags
of interest. These schemes have been enormously successful
for datasets on the scale of dozens of recording hours but
are untenable for long-format recording corpora, which
routinely contain hundreds to thousands of audio hours.
Long-format corpora would benefit greatly from
(semi-)automated analyses, both on the earliest steps of
annotation-voice activity detection, utterance segmentation,
and speaker diarization-As well as later steps-e.g.,
classification-based codes such as child-vsadult-directed
speech, and speech recognition to produce phonetic/
orthographic representations. We present an annotation
workflow specifically designed for long-format corpora which
can be tailored by individual researchers and which
interfaces with the current dominant scheme for short-format
recordings. The workflow allows semi-Automated annotation
and analyses at higher linguistic levels. We give one
example of how the workflow has been successfully
implemented in a large crossdatabase project. keywords
Daylong recordings∗Language acquisition∗Annotation∗Speech
recognition∗Speaker diarization.},
Doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1418},
Key = {fds332032}
}
@article{fds332033,
Author = {Warlaumont, AS and VanDam, M and Bergelson, E and Cristia,
A},
Title = {Home Bank: A repository for long-form real-world audio
recordings of children},
Journal = {Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International
Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH},
Volume = {2017-August},
Pages = {815-816},
Year = {2017},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2017-2051},
Abstract = {Copyright © 2017 ISCA. HomeBank is a new component of the
TalkBank system, focused on long-form (i.e., multi-hour,
typically daylong) realworld recordings of children's
language experiences, and it is linked to a GitHub
repository in which tools for analyzing those recordings can
be shared. HomeBank constitutes not only a rich resource for
researchers interested in early language acquisition
specifically, but also for those seeking to study
spontaneous speech, media exposure, and audio environments
more generally. This Show and Tell describes the procedures
for accessing and contributing HomeBank data and code. It
also overviews the current contents of the repositories, and
provides some examples of audio recordings, available
transcriptions, and currently available analysis
tools.},
Doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2017-2051},
Key = {fds332033}
}
@article{fds332034,
Author = {Schuller, B and Steidl, S and Batliner, A and Bergelson, E and Krajewski, J and Janott, C and Amatuni, A and Casillas, M and Seidl, A and Soderstrom, M and Warlaumont, AS and Hidalgo, G and Schnieder, S and Heiser, C and Hohenhorst, W and Herzog, M and Schmitt, M and Qian, K and Zhang, Y and Trigeorgis, G and Tzirakis, P and Zafeiriou,
S},
Title = {The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics
Challenge: Addressee, Cold & Snoring},
Journal = {Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International
Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH},
Volume = {2017-August},
Pages = {3442-3446},
Publisher = {ISCA},
Year = {2017},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2017-43},
Abstract = {The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge
addresses three different problems for the first time in
research competition under well-defined conditions: In the
Addressee sub-challenge, it has to be determined whether
speech produced by an adult is directed towards another
adult or towards a child; in the Cold sub-challenge, speech
under cold has to be told apart from 'healthy' speech; and
in the Snoring sub-challenge, four different types of
snoring have to be classified. In this paper, we describe
these sub-challenges, their conditions, and the baseline
feature extraction and classifiers, which include
data-learnt feature representations by end-to-end learning
with convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and
bag-of-audio-words for the first time in the challenge
series.},
Doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2017-43},
Key = {fds332034}
}
@article{fds376462,
Author = {Amatuni, A and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Semantic Networks Generated from Early Linguistic
Input},
Journal = {CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the
Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of
Cognition},
Pages = {1538-1543},
Year = {2017},
Month = {January},
ISBN = {9780991196760},
Abstract = {Semantic networks generated from different word corpora show
common structural characteristics, including high degrees of
clustering, short average path lengths, and scale free
degree distributions. Previous research has disagreed about
whether these features emerge from internally- or
externally-driven properties (i.e. words already in the
lexicon vs. regularities in the external world), mapping
onto preferential attachment and preferential acquisition
accounts, respectively (Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005; Hills,
Maouene, Maouene, Sheya, & Smith, 2009). Such accounts
suggest that inherent semantic structure shapes new lexical
growth. Here we extend previous work by creating semantic
networks using the SEEDLingS corpus, a newly collected
corpus of linguistic input to infants. Using a recently
developed LSA-like approach (GLoVe vectors), we confirm the
presence of previously reported structural characteristics,
but only in certain ranges of semantic similarity space. Our
results confirm the robustness of certain aspects of network
organization, and provide novel evidence in support of
preferential acquisition accounts.},
Key = {fds376462}
}
@article{fds327381,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Aslin, R},
Title = {Semantic Specificity in One-Year-Olds' Word
Comprehension.},
Journal = {Language learning and development : the official journal of
the Society for Language Development},
Volume = {13},
Number = {4},
Pages = {481-501},
Year = {2017},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2017.1324308},
Abstract = {The present study investigated infants' knowledge about
familiar nouns. Infants (n = 46, 12-20-month-olds) saw
two-image displays of familiar objects, or one familiar and
one novel object. Infants heard either a matching word (e.g.
"foot' when seeing foot and juice), a related word (e.g.
"sock" when seeing foot and juice) or a nonce word (e.g.
"fep" when seeing a novel object and dog). Across the whole
sample, infants reliably fixated the referent on matching
and nonce trials. On the critical related trials we found
increasingly less looking to the incorrect (but related)
image with age. These results suggest that one-year-olds
look at familiar objects both when they hear them labeled
and when they hear related labels, to similar degrees, but
over the second year increasingly rely on semantic fit. We
suggest that infants' initial semantic representations are
imprecise, and continue to sharpen over the second postnatal
year.},
Doi = {10.1080/15475441.2017.1324308},
Key = {fds327381}
}
@article{fds333674,
Author = {Amatuni, A and Bergelson, E},
Title = {Semantic Networks Generated from Early Linguistic
Input},
Pages = {1538-1543},
Publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory},
Editor = {Gunzelmann, G and Howes, A and Tenbrink, T and Davelaar,
EJ},
Year = {2017},
ISBN = {9780991196760},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/157701},
Abstract = {Semantic networks generated from different word corpora show
common structural characteristics, including high degrees of
clustering, short average path lengths, and scale free
degree distributions. Previous research has disagreed about
whether these features emerge from internally or externally
driven properties (i.e. words already in the lexicon vs.
regularities in the external world), mapping onto
preferential attachment and preferential acquisition
accounts, respectively (Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005; Hills,
Maouene, Maouene, Sheya, & Smith, 2009). Such accounts
suggest that inherent semantic structure shapes new lexical
growth. Here we extend previous work by creating semantic
networks using the SEEDLingS corpus, a newly collected
corpus of linguistic input to infants. Using a recently
developed LSA-like approach (GLoVe vectors), we confirm the
presence of previously reported structural characteristics,
but only in certain ranges of semantic similarity space. Our
results confirm the robustness of certain aspects of network
organization, and provide novel evidence in support of
preferential acquisition accounts.},
Doi = {10.1101/157701},
Key = {fds333674}
}
@article{fds333675,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Amatuni, A and Casillas, M and Seidl, A and Soderstrom,
M and Warlaumont, AS},
Title = {Description of the Homebank Child/Adult Addressee Corpus
(HB-CHAAC).},
Journal = {INTERSPEECH},
Publisher = {ISCA},
Editor = {Lacerda, F},
Year = {2017},
Key = {fds333675}
}
@article{fds333676,
Author = {Laing, C and Bergelson, E},
Title = {More Siblings Means Lower Input Quality in Early Language
Development.},
Journal = {CogSci},
Publisher = {cognitivesciencesociety.org},
Editor = {Gunzelmann, G and Howes, A and Tenbrink, T and Davelaar,
EJ},
Year = {2017},
ISBN = {978-0-9911967-6-0},
Key = {fds333676}
}
@article{fds318667,
Author = {VanDam, M and Warlaumont, AS and Bergelson, E and Cristia, A and Soderstrom, M and De Palma and P and MacWhinney, B},
Title = {HomeBank: An Online Repository of Daylong Child-Centered
Audio Recordings.},
Journal = {Seminars in speech and language},
Volume = {37},
Number = {2},
Pages = {128-142},
Year = {2016},
Month = {May},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1055/s-0036-1580745},
Abstract = {HomeBank is introduced here. It is a public, permanent,
extensible, online database of daylong audio recorded in
naturalistic environments. HomeBank serves two primary
purposes. First, it is a repository for raw audio and
associated files: one database requires special permissions,
and another redacted database allows unrestricted public
access. Associated files include metadata such as
participant demographics and clinical diagnostics, automated
annotations, and human-generated transcriptions and
annotations. Many recordings use the child-perspective LENA
recorders (LENA Research Foundation, Boulder, Colorado,
United States), but various recordings and metadata can be
accommodated. The HomeBank database can have both vetted and
unvetted recordings, with different levels of accessibility.
Additionally, HomeBank is an open repository for processing
and analysis tools for HomeBank or similar data sets.
HomeBank is flexible for users and contributors, making
primary data available to researchers, especially those in
child development, linguistics, and audio engineering.
HomeBank facilitates researchers' access to large-scale data
and tools, linking the acoustic, auditory, and linguistic
characteristics of children's environments with a variety of
variables including socioeconomic status, family
characteristics, language trajectories, and disorders.
Automated processing applied to daylong home audio
recordings is now becoming widely used in early intervention
initiatives, helping parents to provide richer speech input
to at-risk children.},
Doi = {10.1055/s-0036-1580745},
Key = {fds318667}
}
@article{fds318668,
Author = {Metze, F and Riebling, E and Warlaumont, AS and Bergelson,
E},
Title = {Virtual machines and containers as a platform for
experimentation},
Journal = {Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International
Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH},
Volume = {08-12-September-2016},
Pages = {1603-1607},
Publisher = {ISCA},
Year = {2016},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2016-997},
Abstract = {Research on computational speech processing has
traditionally relied on the availability of a relatively
large and complex infrastructure, which encompasses data
(text and audio), tools (feature extraction, model training,
scoring, possibly on-line and off-line, etc.), glue code,
and computing. Traditionally, it has been very hard to move
experiments from one site to another, and to replicate
experiments. With the increasing availability of shared
platforms such as commercial cloud computing platforms or
publicly funded super-computing centers, there is a need and
an opportunity to abstract the experimental environment from
the hardware, and distribute complete setups as a virtual
machine, a container, or some other shareable resource, that
can be deployed and worked with anywhere. In this paper, we
discuss our experience with this concept and present some
tools that the community might find useful. We outline, as a
case study, how such tools can be applied to a naturalistic
language acquisition audio corpus.},
Doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2016-997},
Key = {fds318668}
}
@article{fds333677,
Author = {Bergelson, E},
Title = {Workshop on Corpus Collection, (Semi)-Automated Analysis,
and Modeling of Large-Scale Naturalistic Language
Acquisition Data},
Journal = {Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society, CogSci 2016},
Pages = {21-22},
Publisher = {cognitivesciencesociety.org},
Editor = {Papafragou, A and Grodner, D and Mirman, D and Trueswell,
JC},
Year = {2016},
Month = {January},
ISBN = {9780991196739},
Key = {fds333677}
}
@article{fds318669,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Swingley, D},
Title = {Early Word Comprehension in Infants: Replication and
Extension.},
Journal = {Language learning and development : the official journal of
the Society for Language Development},
Volume = {11},
Number = {4},
Pages = {369-380},
Year = {2015},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2014.979387},
Abstract = {A handful of recent experimental reports have shown that
infants of 6 to 9 months know the meanings of some common
words. Here, we replicate and extend these findings. With a
new set of items, we show that when young infants (age 6-16
months, n=49) are presented with side-by-side video clips
depicting various common early words, and one clip is named
in a sentence, they look at the named video at above-chance
rates. We demonstrate anew that infants understand common
words by 6-9 months, and that performance increases
substantially around 14 months. The results imply that 6-9
month olds' failure to understand words not referring to
objects (verbs, adjectives, performatives) in a similar
prior study is not attributable to the use of dynamic video
depictions. Thus, 6-9 month olds' experience of spoken
language includes some understanding of common words for
concrete objects, but relatively impoverished comprehension
of other words.},
Doi = {10.1080/15475441.2014.979387},
Key = {fds318669}
}
@article{fds318670,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Swingley, D},
Title = {The acquisition of abstract words by young
infants.},
Journal = {Cognition},
Volume = {127},
Number = {3},
Pages = {391-397},
Year = {2013},
Month = {June},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.011},
Abstract = {Young infants' learning of words for abstract concepts like
'all gone' and 'eat,' in contrast to their learning of more
concrete words like 'apple' and 'shoe,' may follow a
relatively protracted developmental course. We examined
whether infants know such abstract words. Parents named one
of two events shown in side-by-side videos while their
6-16-month-old infants (n=98) watched. On average, infants
successfully looked at the named video by 10 months, but not
earlier, and infants' looking at the named referent
increased robustly at around 14 months. Six-month-olds
already understand concrete words in this task (Bergelson &
Swingley, 2012). A video-corpus analysis of unscripted
mother-infant interaction showed that mothers used the
tested abstract words less often in the presence of their
referent events than they used concrete words in the
presence of their referent objects. We suggest that
referential uncertainty in abstract words' teaching
conditions may explain the later acquisition of abstract
than concrete words, and we discuss the possible role of
changes in social-cognitive abilities over the 6-14 month
period.},
Doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.011},
Key = {fds318670}
}
@article{fds318673,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Swingley, D},
Title = {Social and Environmental Contributors to Infant Word
Learning},
Journal = {Cooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics -
Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society, CogSci 2013},
Pages = {187-192},
Publisher = {cognitivesciencesociety.org},
Editor = {Knauff, M and Pauen, M and Sebanz, N and Wachsmuth,
I},
Year = {2013},
Month = {January},
ISBN = {9780976831891},
Abstract = {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 of which suggest an
improvement in point-following around ten months, and reveal
correlations between pointing and both overall and non-noun
vocabulary. Expt. 2 is a set of corpus analyses, the results
of which suggest that word frequency does not explain the
difference between noun and non-noun age of acquisition,
while suggesting that the co-presence of words and their
referents may play an important role. The results of these
experiments contribute to our understanding of word-learning
across word classes, and lend support to environmental and
social factors as having an impact on the trajectory of word
learning in the first year of life.},
Key = {fds318673}
}
@article{fds318671,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Shvartsman, M and Idsardi, WJ},
Title = {Differences in mismatch responses to vowels and musical
intervals: MEG evidence.},
Journal = {PloS one},
Volume = {8},
Number = {10},
Pages = {e76758},
Year = {2013},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0076758},
Abstract = {We investigated the electrophysiological response to matched
two-formant vowels and two-note musical intervals, with the
goal of examining whether music is processed differently
from language in early cortical responses. Using
magnetoencephalography (MEG), we compared the
mismatch-response (MMN/MMF, an early, pre-attentive
difference-detector occurring approximately 200 ms
post-onset) to musical intervals and vowels composed of
matched frequencies. Participants heard blocks of two
stimuli in a passive oddball paradigm in one of three
conditions: sine waves, piano tones and vowels. In each
condition, participants heard two-formant vowels or musical
intervals whose frequencies were 11, 12, or 24 semitones
apart. In music, 12 semitones and 24 semitones are perceived
as highly similar intervals (one and two octaves,
respectively), while in speech 12 semitones and 11 semitones
formant separations are perceived as highly similar (both
variants of the vowel in 'cut'). Our results indicate that
the MMN response mirrors the perceptual one: larger MMNs
were elicited for the 12-11 pairing in the music conditions
than in the language condition; conversely, larger MMNs were
elicited to the 12-24 pairing in the language condition that
in the music conditions, suggesting that within 250 ms of
hearing complex auditory stimuli, the neural computation of
similarity, just as the behavioral one, differs
significantly depending on whether the context is music or
speech.},
Doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0076758},
Key = {fds318671}
}
@article{fds318672,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Swingley, D},
Title = {Young toddlers' word comprehension is flexible and
efficient.},
Journal = {PloS one},
Volume = {8},
Number = {8},
Pages = {e73359},
Year = {2013},
Month = {January},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0073359},
Abstract = {Much of what is known about word recognition in toddlers
comes from eyetracking studies. Here we show that the speed
and facility with which children recognize words, as
revealed in such studies, cannot be attributed to a
task-specific, closed-set strategy; rather, children's gaze
to referents of spoken nouns reflects successful search of
the lexicon. Toddlers' spoken word comprehension was
examined in the context of pictures that had two possible
names (such as a cup of juice which could be called "cup" or
"juice") and pictures that had only one likely name for
toddlers (such as "apple"), using a visual world
eye-tracking task and a picture-labeling task (n = 77,
mean age, 21 months). Toddlers were just as fast and
accurate in fixating named pictures with two likely names as
pictures with one. If toddlers do name pictures to
themselves, the name provides no apparent benefit in word
recognition, because there is no cost to understanding an
alternative lexical construal of the picture. In toddlers,
as in adults, spoken words rapidly evoke their
referents.},
Doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0073359},
Key = {fds318672}
}
@article{fds318674,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Swingley, D},
Title = {At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many
common nouns.},
Journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America},
Volume = {109},
Number = {9},
Pages = {3253-3258},
Year = {2012},
Month = {February},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1113380109},
Abstract = {It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their
native language not by learning words, but by discovering
features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and
combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words,
as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come
later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a
capacity for interpreting others' goals and intentions.
Here, we demonstrate that this consensus about the
developmental sequence of human language learning is flawed:
in fact, infants already know the meanings of several common
words from the age of 6 mo onward. We presented 6- to
9-mo-old infants with sets of pictures to view while their
parent named a picture in each set. Over this entire age
range, infants directed their gaze to the named pictures,
indicating their understanding of spoken words. Because the
words were not trained in the laboratory, the results show
that even young infants learn ordinary words through daily
experience with language. This surprising accomplishment
indicates that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, either
infants can already grasp the referential intentions of
adults at 6 mo or infants can learn words before this
ability emerges. The precocious discovery of word meanings
suggests a perspective in which learning vocabulary and
learning the sound structure of spoken language go hand in
hand as language acquisition begins.},
Doi = {10.1073/pnas.1113380109},
Key = {fds318674}
}
@article{fds318675,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Idsardi, WJ},
Title = {A neurophysiological study into the foundations of tonal
harmony.},
Journal = {Neuroreport},
Volume = {20},
Number = {3},
Pages = {239-244},
Year = {2009},
Month = {February},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/wnr.0b013e32831ddebf},
Abstract = {Our findings provide magnetoencephalographic evidence that
the mismatch-negativity response to two-note chords (dyads)
is modulated by a combination of abstract cognitive
differences and lower-level differences in the auditory
signal. Participants were presented with series of
simple-ratio sinusoidal dyads (perfect fourths and perfect
fifths) in which the difference between the standard and
deviant dyad exhibited an interval change, a shift in pitch
space, or both. In addition, the standard-deviant pair of
dyads either shared one note or both notes were changed.
Only the condition that featured both abstract changes
(interval change and pitch-space shift) and two novel notes
showed a significantly larger magnetoencephalographic
mismatch-negativity response than the other conditions in
the right hemisphere. Implications for music and language
processing are discussed.},
Doi = {10.1097/wnr.0b013e32831ddebf},
Key = {fds318675}
}
@article{fds337244,
Author = {Bergelson, E and Idsardi, WJ},
Title = {Structural Biases in Phonology: Infant and Adult Evidence
from Artificial Language Learning},
Journal = {PROCEEDINGS OF THE 33RD ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE
ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT, VOLS 1 AND 2},
Pages = {85-+},
Publisher = {CASCADILLA PRESS},
Editor = {Chandlee, J and Franchini, M and Lord, S and Rheiner,
GM},
Year = {2009},
Month = {January},
ISBN = {978-1-57473-094-4},
Key = {fds337244}
}
@article{fds330847,
Author = {Poeppel, D and Bergelson, E},
Title = {How music speaks to us},
Journal = {Nature},
Volume = {452},
Number = {7188},
Pages = {695-696},
Publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media LLC},
Year = {2008},
Month = {April},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/452695a},
Doi = {10.1038/452695a},
Key = {fds330847}
}
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