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Detecting structured repetition in child-surrounding speech: Evidence from maximally diverse languages
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In: Lester, Nicholas A; Moran, Steven; Küntay, Aylin C; Allen, Shanley E M; Pfeiler, Barbara; Stoll, Sabine (2022). Detecting structured repetition in child-surrounding speech: Evidence from maximally diverse languages. Cognition, 221:104986. (2022)
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Abstract:
Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation between utterances is necessary to support acquisition of a fully productive grammar. When individual words or morphemes are repeated, but embedded in different lexical and syntactic contexts, the child has more information about how these forms may be used and combined. Corpus analysis has shown that these partial repetitions frequently occur in clusters, which have been coined variation sets. More recent research has introduced algorithms that can extract these variation sets automatically from corpora with the goal of measuring their relative prevalence across ages and languages. Longitudinal analyses have revealed that rates of variation sets tend to decrease as children get older. We extend this research in several ways. First, we consider a maximally diverse sample of languages, both genealogically and geographically, to test the generalizability of developmental trends. Second, we compare multiple levels of repetition, both words and morphemes, to account for typological differences in how information is encoded. Third, we consider several additional measures of development to account for deficiencies in age as a measure of linguistic aptitude. Fourth, we examine whether the levels of repetition found in child-surrounding speech is greater or less than what would have been expected by chance. This analysis produced a new measure, redundancy, which captures how repetitive speech is on average given how repeititive it could have been. Fifth, we compare rates of repetition in child-surrounding and adult-directed speech to test whether variation sets are especially prevalent in child-surrounding speech. We find that (1) some languages show increases in repetition over development, (2) true estimates of variation sets are generally lower than or equal to random baselines, (3) these patterns are largely convergent across developmental indices, and (4) adult-directed speech is reliably less redundant, though in some cases more repetitive, than child-surrounding speech. These results are discussed with respect to features of the corpora, typological properties of the languages, and differential rates of change in repetition and redundancy over children's development.
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Keyword:
410 Linguistics; 490 Other languages; 890 Other literatures; Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution; Cognitive Neuroscience; Department of Comparative Linguistics; Developmental and Educational Psychology; Experimental and Cognitive Psychology; Language and Linguistics; Linguistics and Language; NCCR Evolving Language
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URL: https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/213137/1/1-s2.0-S0010027721004091-main.pdf
https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-213137
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104986
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/213137/
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Deconstructing the Native Speaker: Further Evidence From Heritage Speakers for Why This Horse Should Be Dead!
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In: Front Psychol (2021)
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Towards a methodological toolset for the psycholinguistics of translation: The case of priming paradigms : The case of priming paradigms
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Effects of speech rate on anticipatory eye movements in the Visual World Paradigm: Evidence from aging, native, and non-native language processing
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The role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming
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