Exploring The Facilitating Effect Of Diminutives On The Acquisition of Serbian Noun Morphology

Studies of Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian language learners converge on the finding that morphological features of nouns are first generalized to word clusters of high morpho-phonological similarities such as diminutives, that grammatical categorisation is are more easily applied to novel words that fall into these clusters. The present thesis explores whether the facilitating effect of diminutives on the acquisition of complex noun morphology can be extended to Serbian, a south Slavic language, morphologically similar to Russian and Polish. Specifically, the thesis explores the role of parameters responsible for the obtained diminutive advantage: high frequency of a particular cluster of words in child-directed speech (CDS) and morpho-phonological homogeneity within this cluster. A corpus analysis of the distribution of diminutives in Serbian CDS indicated a rather unexpected difference in frequency relative to Russian and Polish CDS, despite the high similarity of the diminutive derivation across these three Slavic languages. Out of the total number of nouns in Serbian CDS only 7% were diminutives, compared to 20-30% in Polish and 45% in Russian. Two experimental studies explored whether the low frequency of diminutives in Serbian CDS attenuates the diminutive advantage in morphology learning compared to Russian and Polish. In the first two experiments, Serbian children exhibited a strong diminutive advantage for both gender agreement and case marking in the same range as Russian children, indicating that morpho-phonological homogeneity within the cluster of diminutives may play as important a role as their frequency for grammatical categorisation of novel nouns. A third study investigated in more detail the effects of morpho-phonological homogeneity on the emergence of the diminutive advantage using a gender-agreement task with novel nouns in simplex and pseudo-diminutive form over four sessions with Serbian children. The results showed a pseudo-diminutive advantage for gender agreement by Session 2, suggesting that the categorisation of nouns into grammatical categories is based on morpho-phonological homogeneity of the word cluster, emerges relatively fast, and can occur despite the much lower frequency of diminutives in Serbian CDS. Finally, a series of neural network simulations designed to capture the pattern of results from the third experimental study was used to examine to what extent a simple associative learning mechanism, relying on morpho-phonological similarity of the noun endings, can explain the findings. The performance of three models, a whole-word feed-forward network, a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) and a last-syllable feed-forward network, was compared to the experimental data. The superior fit of the SRN suggests that gender learning is based on a very fast sequential build-up of representations of the entire word, allowing the system to exploit the predictive power of word stems to anticipate regularised endings. Overall, the findings of this thesis contribute to our general understanding of mechanisms responsible for the acquisition of complex inflectional noun morphology in two ways. First, by extending experimental studies and neural network simulations to Serbian, the results underline the universality of the idea that noun morphology is learned and processed through a single-route associative mechanism based on the frequency and morpho-phonological structure of nouns. More specifically, the results from experimental studies and neural network simulations demonstrate that for diminutives, the low-level grammatical categorisation is based mainly on the morpho-phonological similarity of word endings, and can emerge after just a few exposures. And second, the neural network simulations suggest that during the process of categorisation of nouns into gender categories, learners rely not only on predictable information from the noun endings, but also on phonological regularities in the stems of nouns. Taken together, these findings contribute also to a better understanding of the facilitating role of CDS in morphology acquisition

Child-directed Speech in Qaqet

Qaqet is a non-Austronesian language, spoken by about 15,000 people in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. In the remote inland, children acquire Qaqet as their first language. Much of what we know about child‑directed speech (CDS) stems from children living in middle‑class, urban, industrialised contexts. This book combines evidence from different methods, showing that the features typical for speech to children in such contexts are also found in Qaqet CDS. Preliminary insights from naturalistic audio recordings suggest that Qaqet children are infrequently addressed directly. In interviews, Qaqet caregivers express the view that children 'pick up' the language on their own. Still, they have clear ideas about how to talk to children in a way that makes it easier for them to understand what is said. In order to compare adult- and child-directed speech in Qaqet, 20 retellings of a film have been analysed, half of them told to adults and half to children. The data show that talk directed to children differs from talk directed to adults for several features, among them utterance type, mean length of utterance, amount of hesitations and intonation. Despite this clear tendency, there seems to be a cut-off point of around 40 months of age for several of those features from which the talk directed to children becomes more like the talk directed to adults

Child-directed Speech in Qaqet

Qaqet is a non-Austronesian language, spoken by about 15,000 people in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. In the remote inland, children acquire Qaqet as their first language. Much of what we know about child‑directed speech (CDS) stems from children living in middle‑class, urban, industrialised contexts. This book combines evidence from different methods, showing that the features typical for speech to children in such contexts are also found in Qaqet CDS. Preliminary insights from naturalistic audio recordings suggest that Qaqet children are infrequently addressed directly. In interviews, Qaqet caregivers express the view that children 'pick up' the language on their own. Still, they have clear ideas about how to talk to children in a way that makes it easier for them to understand what is said. In order to compare adult- and child-directed speech in Qaqet, 20 retellings of a film have been analysed, half of them told to adults and half to children. The data show that talk directed to children differs from talk directed to adults for several features, among them utterance type, mean length of utterance, amount of hesitations and intonation. Despite this clear tendency, there seems to be a cut-off point of around 40 months of age for several of those features from which the talk directed to children becomes more like the talk directed to adults

Intelligibility of speech addressed to children

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D44476/83 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Exploring the facilitating effect of diminutives on the acquisition of Serbian noun morphology

Studies of Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian language learners converge on the finding that morphological features of nouns are first generalized to word clusters of high morpho-phonological similarities such as diminutives, that grammatical categorisation is are more easily applied to novel words that fall into these clusters. The present thesis explores whether the facilitating effect of diminutives on the acquisition of complex noun morphology can be extended to Serbian, a south Slavic language, morphologically similar to Russian and Polish. Specifically, the thesis explores the role of parameters responsible for the obtained diminutive advantage: high frequency of a particular cluster of words in child-directed speech (CDS) and morpho-phonological homogeneity within this cluster. A corpus analysis of the distribution of diminutives in Serbian CDS indicated a rather unexpected difference in frequency relative to Russian and Polish CDS, despite the high similarity of the diminutive derivation across these three Slavic languages. Out of the total number of nouns in Serbian CDS only 7% were diminutives, compared to 20-30% in Polish and 45% in Russian. Two experimental studies explored whether the low frequency of diminutives in Serbian CDS attenuates the diminutive advantage in morphology learning compared to Russian and Polish. In the first two experiments, Serbian children exhibited a strong diminutive advantage for both gender agreement and case marking in the same range as Russian children, indicating that morpho-phonological homogeneity within the cluster of diminutives may play as important a role as their frequency for grammatical categorisation of novel nouns. A third study investigated in more detail the effects of morpho-phonological homogeneity on the emergence of the diminutive advantage using a gender-agreement task with novel nouns in simplex and pseudo-diminutive form over four sessions with Serbian children. The results showed a pseudo-diminutive advantage for gender agreement by Session 2, suggesting that the categorisation of nouns into grammatical categories is based on morpho-phonological homogeneity of the word cluster, emerges relatively fast, and can occur despite the much lower frequency of diminutives in Serbian CDS. Finally, a series of neural network simulations designed to capture the pattern of results from the third experimental study was used to examine to what extent a simple associative learning mechanism, relying on morpho-phonological similarity of the noun endings, can explain the findings. The performance of three models, a whole-word feed-forward network, a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) and a last-syllable feed-forward network, was compared to the experimental data. The superior fit of the SRN suggests that gender learning is based on a very fast sequential build-up of representations of the entire word, allowing the system to exploit the predictive power of word stems to anticipate regularised endings. Overall, the findings of this thesis contribute to our general understanding of mechanisms responsible for the acquisition of complex inflectional noun morphology in two ways. First, by extending experimental studies and neural network simulations to Serbian, the results underline the universality of the idea that noun morphology is learned and processed through a single-route associative mechanism based on the frequency and morpho-phonological structure of nouns. More specifically, the results from experimental studies and neural network simulations demonstrate that for diminutives, the low-level grammatical categorisation is based mainly on the morpho-phonological similarity of word endings, and can emerge after just a few exposures. And second, the neural network simulations suggest that during the process of categorisation of nouns into gender categories, learners rely not only on predictable information from the noun endings, but also on phonological regularities in the stems of nouns. Taken together, these findings contribute also to a better understanding of the facilitating role of CDS in morphology acquisition.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Aspekte der Charakterisierung phonologischer Sprachstörungen vs. verzögerter Spracherwerb bei jordanischem Arabisch sprechenden Kindern

Bader S'da SI. Issues in the characterisation of phonological speech impairment vs. delayed acquisition in Jordanian Arabic-Speaking children. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2010.Eine Studie des Spracherwerbs des jordanischen Arabisch bei jungen Muttersprachlern.A study with children speaking or acquiring Jordanian Arabic with or without phonological impairments

A Study of Accomodation of Prosodic and Temporal Features in Spoken Dialogues in View of Speech Technology Applications

Inter-speaker accommodation is a well-known property of human speech and human interaction in general. Broadly it refers to the behavioural patterns of two (or more) interactants and the effect of the (verbal and non-verbal) behaviour of each to that of the other(s). Implementation of thisbehavior in spoken dialogue systems is desirable as an improvement on the naturalness of humanmachine interaction. However, traditional qualitative descriptions of accommodation phenomena do not provide sufficient information for such an implementation. Therefore, a quantitativedescription of inter-speaker accommodation is required. This thesis proposes a methodology of monitoring accommodation during a human or humancomputer dialogue, which utilizes a moving average filter over sequential frames for each speaker. These frames are time-aligned across the speakers, hence the name Time Aligned Moving Average (TAMA). Analysis of spontaneous human dialogue recordings by means of the TAMA methodology reveals ubiquitous accommodation of prosodic features (pitch, intensity and speech rate) across interlocutors, and allows for statistical (time series) modeling of the behaviour, in a way which is meaningful for implementation in spoken dialogue system (SDS) environments.In addition, a novel dialogue representation is proposed that provides an additional point of view to that of TAMA in monitoring accommodation of temporal features (inter-speaker pause length and overlap frequency). This representation is a percentage turn distribution of individual speakercontributions in a dialogue frame which circumvents strict attribution of speaker-turns, by considering both interlocutors as synchronously active. Both TAMA and turn distribution metrics indicate that correlation of average pause length and overlap frequency between speakers can be attributed to accommodation (a debated issue), and point to possible improvements in SDS “turntaking” behaviour. Although the findings of the prosodic and temporal analyses can directly inform SDS implementations, further work is required in order to describe inter-speaker accommodation sufficiently, as well as to develop an adequate testing platform for evaluating the magnitude ofperceived improvement in human-machine interaction. Therefore, this thesis constitutes a first step towards a convincingly useful implementation of accommodation in spoken dialogue systems

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The MAVEBA Workshop proceedings, held on a biannual basis, collect the scientific papers presented both as oral and poster contributions, during the conference. The main subjects are: development of theoretical and mechanical models as an aid to the study of main phonatory dysfunctions, as well as the biomedical engineering methods for the analysis of voice signals and images, as a support to clinical diagnosis and classification of vocal pathologies