Young Infants’ Word Comprehension Given An Unfamiliar Talker or Altered Pronunciations

Bergelson, Elika; Swingley, Daniel

doi:10.1111/cdev.12888

Cited by 37 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The present results suggest that while infants hear most of their input from their mothers, they also hear several other speakers during high talk‐volume times, which in turn feed infants’ word‐form representations. Indeed, recent lab studies have found that at this age, infants look equivalently to named images when words are reproduced by a new person or their mother (Bergelson & Swingley, ), suggesting some degree of cross‐talker normalization by ~6 months. In contrast, 14‐month‐olds’ learning of similar‐sounding words improves after training with tokens from multiple speakers (Rost & McMurray, ), suggesting that even small amounts of talker variability aid new learning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants

Bergelson

Amatuni

Dailey

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

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158

116

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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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants

Bergelson

Amatuni

Dailey

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

Self Cite

158

116

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For instance, in light of these results, theories of phonological development may consider more heavily that infants’ native language phonemic representations do not sample from the full range of speaker variability, but are instead dominated by adult female speakers’ phonemes, which themselves are more CDS‐heavy than the (minority) input from male adults (cf. Bergelson & Swingley, ; Martin et al., ). Indeed work with slightly older children has found differences in phonetic realizations of sociolinguistic variants in CDS that differ from those in ADS (Foulkes, Docherty, & Watt, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Do North American Babies Hear? A large‐scale cross‐corpus analysis

Bergelson

Casillas

Söderström

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

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124

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A range of demographic variables influence 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 re-use and re-analysis by other researchers.

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“…The ability to generalize across speakers, genders, or emotions emerges around 10.5 months of age [47,48], with evidence of infants' ability to generalize across accents emerging around their first birthday [49,50]. Related work on infant word recognition suggests that infants between 8 and 10 months old might be particularly negatively impacted by speech variation [51]. Thus, it is conceivable that the infants up to one year of age are not yet able to transfer words learned from song to speech.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants Segment Words from Songs—An EEG Study

2020

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Children’s songs are omnipresent and highly attractive stimuli in infants’ input. Previous work suggests that infants process linguistic–phonetic information from simplified sung melodies. The present study investigated whether infants learn words from ecologically valid children’s songs. Testing 40 Dutch-learning 10-month-olds in a familiarization-then-test electroencephalography (EEG) paradigm, this study asked whether infants can segment repeated target words embedded in songs during familiarization and subsequently recognize those words in continuous speech in the test phase. To replicate previous speech work and compare segmentation across modalities, infants participated in both song and speech sessions. Results showed a positive event-related potential (ERP) familiarity effect to the final compared to the first target occurrences during both song and speech familiarization. No evidence was found for word recognition in the test phase following either song or speech. Comparisons across the stimuli of the present and a comparable previous study suggested that acoustic prominence and speech rate may have contributed to the polarity of the ERP familiarity effect and its absence in the test phase. Overall, the present study provides evidence that 10-month-old infants can segment words embedded in songs, and it raises questions about the acoustic and other factors that enable or hinder infant word segmentation from songs and speech.

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Young Infants’ Word Comprehension Given An Unfamiliar Talker or Altered Pronunciations

Cited by 37 publications

References 42 publications

Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants

Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants

What Do North American Babies Hear? A large‐scale cross‐corpus analysis

Infants Segment Words from Songs—An EEG Study

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