{"pk":28785,"title":"Is it easier to segment words from infant- than adult-directed speech?Modeling evidence from an ecological French corpus","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Infants learn language by exposure to streams of speech pro-duced by their caregivers. Early on, they manage to segmentword forms out of this continuous input, which is either di-rectly addressed to them, or directed to other adults, thus over-heard. It has been suggested that infant-directed speech is sim-plified and could facilitate language learning. This study aimedto investigate whether features such as utterance length, seg-mentation entropy and lexical diversity could account for anadvantage in segmentability of infant-directed speech. A largeset of word segmentation algorithms was used on an ecolog-ically valid corpus, consisting of 18 sets of recordings gath-ered from French-learning infants aged 3-48 months. A se-ries of textual analyses confirmed several simplicity featuresof infant-, compared to adult-directed speech. A small seg-mentation advantage was also documented, which could notbe attributed to any of those corpus features. Some particular-ities of the data invite further research on more corpora.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"language acquisition; infant-directed speech;computational modeling; word segmentation; unsuper-vised learning"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/95w1g3x0","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Georgia","middle_name":"","last_name":"Loukatou","name_suffix":"","institution":"PSL University Paris","department":""},{"first_name":"Marie-Th ́er`ese","middle_name":"","last_name":"Le Normand","name_suffix":"","institution":"Universit ́e Paris Descartes, Sorbonne","department":""},{"first_name":"Alejandrina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Cristia","name_suffix":"","institution":"PSL University Paris","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28785/galley/18656/download/"}]}