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. 2019 Feb 1:3:13-22.
doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00022.

Segmentability Differences Between Child-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech: A Systematic Test With an Ecologically Valid Corpus

Alejandrina Cristia  1 , Emmanuel Dupoux  1 , Nan Bernstein Ratner  2 , Melanie Soderstrom  3
Affiliations

Segmentability Differences Between Child-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech: A Systematic Test With an Ecologically Valid Corpus

Alejandrina Cristia et al. Open Mind (Camb). .

Abstract

Previous computational modeling suggests it is much easier to segment words from child-directed speech (CDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). However, this conclusion is based on data collected in the laboratory, with CDS from play sessions and ADS between a parent and an experimenter, which may not be representative of ecologically collected CDS and ADS. Fully naturalistic ADS and CDS collected with a nonintrusive recording device as the child went about her day were analyzed with a diverse set of algorithms. The difference between registers was small compared to differences between algorithms; it reduced when corpora were matched, and it even reversed under some conditions. These results highlight the interest of studying learnability using naturalistic corpora and diverse algorithmic definitions.

Keywords: computational modeling; infant word segmentation; learnability; lexicon; statistical learning.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: None of the authors declare any competing interests.

Figures

<b>Figure 1.</b>
Figure 1.
Token F-score (in percentage) achieved by each algorithm in child-directed speech (CDS) as a function of that in adult-directed speech (ADS) in the full Winnipeg corpus with human-set utterance boundaries. Error bars indicate two standard deviations (over 10 resamples; see main text and Supplemental Materials, Cristia, , for details).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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