Adults adapt to child speech in semantic use

Abstract

Children acquire their first language while interacting with adults in a highly adaptive manner. While adaptation occurs at many linguistic levels such as syntax and speech complexity, semantic adaptation remains unclear due to the difficulty of efficient meaning extraction. In this study, we examine the adaptation of semantics with a computational approach based on distributional information. We show that adults, in their speech addressed to children, adapt their distributional semantics to that in the speech children produce. By analyzing semantic representations modeled from the Manchester corpus, a large longitudinal acquisition corpus of English, we find striking similarity of semantic development between child and child-directed speech, with a slight time lag in the latter. These findings provide strong evidence for the semantic adaptation in first language acquisition and suggest the important role of child-directed speech in semantic learning.

Laughter Meaning Construction and Use in Development: Children and Spoken Dialogue Systems

“…The variation in laughter alignment and contingent multimodal explicit responses over time in mothers might therefore be one of the features of caregivers' adaptation to the communicative development of their children, similarly to the well known characteristics of child directed speech [105,90,57]. The data presented also matches results from other studies suggesting that when interacting with simpler systems, e.g., virtual agents or robots, human behavioural alignment is particularly marked [13,12].…”

Gradual Route to Productivity: Evidence from Turkish Morphological Causatives

“…Nonetheless, an utterance involving a double causativized lexical causative might be more sophisticated, both formally and semantically (cognitively). Evidence shows that caregivers adjust the sophistication level of their speech based on their child's cognitive and language development (Fusaroli, Weed, Fein, & Naigles, 2019; Huttenlocher, Waterfall, Vasilyeva, Vevea, & Hedges, 2010; Ketrez, 2003; L. Song, Spier, & Tamis‐Lemonda, 2014; You, Daum, et al., 2021). For example, You, Daum, et al.…”

“…Evidence shows that caregivers adjust the sophistication level of their speech based on their child's cognitive and language development (Fusaroli, Weed, Fein, & Naigles, 2019;Huttenlocher, Waterfall, Vasilyeva, Vevea, & Hedges, 2010;Ketrez, 2003;L. Song, Spier, & Tamis-Lemonda, 2014;You, Daum, et al, 2021). For example, You, Daum, et al (2021) found that adults adapted their speech to their child's speech regarding the semantics of lexical causatives.…”

“…Song, Spier, & Tamis-Lemonda, 2014;You, Daum, et al, 2021). For example, You, Daum, et al (2021) found that adults adapted their speech to their child's speech regarding the semantics of lexical causatives. Thus, the appearance of such double -DIr causatives in CDS might come at a later child age, when caregivers grant their children the prerequisite knowledge.…”