Adaptation in Child Directed Speech: Evidence from Corpora

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2011
Host editors
  • R. Artstein
  • M. Core
  • D. DeVault
  • K. Georgila
  • E. Kaiser
  • A. Stent
Book title SemDial 2011 (Los Angelogue)
Book subtitle Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue : September 21-23, 2011, Los Angeles, California
Series Proceedings SemDial
Event SemDial 2011 (the 15th SEMDIAL Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue)
Pages (from-to) 112-119
Publisher Los Angeles, California: Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI)
Abstract
This paper investigates the dynamics of child-directed speech in longitudinal data from the CHILDES corpus. We quantify the complexity of the speech used by each dialogue participant using simple measures. Our results show that there is a strong correlation in all measures between the complexity of the child’s and the mother’s utterances, indicating that adults adapt their speech at different levels of linguistic processing when interacting with children in dialogue. These correlations remain, albeit weaker, after controling for the effects of the child’s age and for local repetitions in the corpus.
Document type Conference contribution
Language English
Downloads
Adaptation in Child Directed Speech (Final published version)
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