| 1. |
- Marklund, Ulrika, et al.
(författare)
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Relationship between parental communicative adjustments and vocabulary production in Swedish infants
- 2011
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Parental linguistic input and interaction style are essential to infant language development. The current study investigates the relationship between Swedish children’s productive vocabulary size and parental communicative adjustments at 18 months (N = 60) and 24 months (N = 61). Vocabulary size is reported with the Swedish adaptation of the MacArthur CDI Words and Sentences (SECDI) while parental communicative adjustments are measured by parental inclination to wait for infants’ vocal communicative initiative and parental inclination to adjust utterance duration to match the duration of infant vocalization. Pauses between utterances and utterance duration of parents and children are tagged in audio recordings of daily-life situations involving parent and child at the family home, such as mealtime, playtime, or reading time. Infants with large productive vocabularies are expected to have parents who are more inclined to wait for communicative initiatives on the part of the infant and to adjust utterance duration to match infant vocalizations. On the other hand, infants with small productive vocabularies are expected to have parents who are less inclined to give room to communicative initiatives and to match input duration to infant production. Small vocabularies are defined by the lowest quartile (0-25%), while large vocabularies are represented by the highest quartile (75-100%) of SECDI scores. Parental communicative adjustments show differential effects on productive vocabulary size at the two ages 18 and 24 months. This indicates a relationship between parental communicative input, as measured in the aspects of turn-taking pauses and duration adjustment, and child vocabulary development.
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| 2. |
- Bergelson, Elika, et al.
(författare)
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Everyday language input and production in 1,001 children from six continents
- 2023
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - 0027-8424 .- 1091-6490. ; 120:52
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)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 4y 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.
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| 3. |
- Bjerva, Johannes, et al.
(författare)
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Anticipatory Looking in Infants and Adults
- 2011
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Ingår i: Proceedings of EyeTrackBehavior 2011.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Infant language acquisition research faces the challenge of dealing with subjects who are unable to provide spoken answers to research questions. To obtain comprehensible data from such subjects eye tracking is a suitable research tool, as the infants’ gaze can be interpreted as behavioural responses. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the amount of training necessary for participants to learn an audio-visual contingency and present anticipatory looking behaviour in response to an auditory stimulus. Infants (n=22) and adults (n=16) were presented with training sequences, every fourth of which was followed by a test sequence. Training sequences contained implicit audio-visual contingencies consisting of a syllable (/da/ or /ga/) followed by an image appearing on the left/right side of the screen. Test sequences were identical to training sequences except that no image appeared. The latency in time to first fixation towards the non-target area during test sequences was used as a measurement of whether the participants had grasped the contingency. Infants were found to present anticipatory looking behaviour after 24 training trials. Adults were found to present anticipatory looking behaviour after 28-36 training trials. In future research a more interactive experiment design will be employed in order to individualise the amount of training, which will increase the time span available for testing.
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| 4. |
- Bjerva, Johannes, et al.
(författare)
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Preceding non-linguistic stimuli affect categorisation of Swedish plosives
- 2012
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Ingår i: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. - : Acoustical Society of America (ASA). - 0001-4966 .- 1520-8524. ; 131:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Speech perception is highly context-dependent. Sounds preceding speech stimuli affect how listeners categorise the stimuli, regardless of whether the context consists of speech or non-speech. This effect is acoustically contrastive; a preceding context with high-frequency acoustic energy tends to skew categorisation towards speech sounds possessing lower-frequency acoustic energy and vice versa (Mann, 1980; Holt, Lotto, Kluender, 2000; Holt, 2005). Partially replicating Holt's study from 2005, the present study investigates the effect of non-linguistic contexts in different frequency bands on speech categorisation. Adult participants (n=15) were exposed to Swedish syllables from a speech continuum ranging from /da/ to /ga/ varying in the onset frequencies of the second and third formants in equal steps. Contexts preceding the speech stimuli consisted of sequences of sine tones distributed in different frequency bands: high, mid and low. Participants were asked to categorise the syllables as /da/ or /ga/. As hypothesised, high frequency contexts shift the category boundary towards /da/, while lower frequency contexts shift the boundary towards /ga/, compared to the mid frequency context.
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| 5. |
- Bjerva, Johannes, et al.
(författare)
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Training in Anticipatory Looking Experiments with Adult Participants
- 2011
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. ; , s. 316-319
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The amount of training necessary to trigger anticipatory looking was investigated in adults (n=16) using a simple testing paradigm, in order to create a baseline for studies on infants’ language acquisition. Participants were presented with training containing implicit associations between two syllables (/da/ and /ga/) and visual events displayed on different areas on the screen. The training series were periodically interrupted by test trials where a syllable was presented but no visual event was displayed. Significantly altered looking behaviour, as measured by participants’ first gaze fixation latency towards the Non-target area (where the visual event should not be expected), was found after 28-36 training trials.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Edlund, Jens, et al.
(författare)
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3rd party observer gaze as a continuous measure of dialogue flow
- 2012
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012. - Istanbul, Turkey : LREC. ; , s. 1354-1358
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present an attempt at using 3rd party observer gaze to get a measure of how appropriate each segment in a dialogue is for a speaker change. The method is a step away from the current dependency of speaker turns or talkspurts towards a more general view of speaker changes. We show that 3rd party observers do indeed largely look at the same thing (the speaker), and how this can be captured and utilized to provide insights into human communication. In addition, the results also suggest that there might be differences in the distribution of 3rd party observer gaze depending on how information-rich an utterance is.
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| 8. |
- Engdahl, Johan, et al.
(författare)
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Acoustic analysis of adults imitating infants : a cross-linguistic perspective
- 2012
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Ingår i: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. - : Acoustical Society of America (ASA). - 0001-4966 .- 1520-8524. ; 131:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The present study investigates adult imitations of infant vocalizations in a cross-linguistic perspective. Japanese-learning and Swedish-learning infants were recorded at ages 16-21 and 78-79 weeks. Vowel-like utterances (n=210) were selected from the recordings and presented to Japanese (n=3) and Swedish (n=3) adults. The adults were asked to imitate what they heard, simulating a spontaneous feedback situation between caregiver and infant. Formant data (F1 and F2) was extracted from all utterances and validated by comparing original and formant re-synthesized utterances. The data was normalized for fundamental frequency and time, and the accumulated spectral difference was calculated between each infant utterance and each imitation of that utterance. The mean spectral difference was calculated and compared, grouped by native language of infant and adult, as well as age of the infant. Preliminary results show smaller spectral difference in the imitations of older infants compared to imitations of the younger group, regardless of infant and adult native language. This may be explained by the increasing stability and more speech-like quality of infants' vocalizations as they grow older (and thus have been exposed to their native language for a longer period of time), making their utterances easier for adults to imitate.
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| 10. |
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