Cette recherche s’intéresse à l’usage de deux variables du français traditionnellement décrites comme phonologiques : la liaison et l’élision du schwa. Ces variables sont étudiées au cours d’interactions naturelles entre trois enfants et leurs parents respectifs. Plus précisément, l’objectif de cette thèse est de décrire les particularités du discours adressé à l’enfant (DAE) au niveau de l’usage des variables phonologiques et de mesurer leur impact sur l’émergence de la production de ces mêmes variables chez l’enfant. Après la présentation du cadre théorique d’analyse et de la méthodologie de recueil, de structuration et d’analyse des données, le travail de recherche s’organise en trois parties. La première étude basée sur corpus, descriptive, a deux principaux objectifs. Dans un premier temps, il s’agit de mesurer à quelle variation les jeunes enfants sont exposés au domicile familial. Ensuite, le but est de confronter les résultats des études précédentes sur l’acquisition de la liaison, principalement obtenus à partir de tâches expérimentales, à des données issues de corpus denses d’interactions parent-enfant. Cette étude a notamment permis de relever l’influence de facteurs liés à l’usage, comme la fréquence, sur l’emploi des variables phonologiques. La seconde étude se focalise sur les caractéristiques du DAE. Les résultats présentés démontrent notamment que l’usage des variables phonologiques est modulé en DAE, et ce essentiellement à un stade précoce. Cette modulation s’atténue ensuite au cours du développement linguistique des jeunes sujets. La dernière étude de ce travail de recherche permet de mettre en relation les productions enfantines et parentales. Il apparaît que le développement de la variation phonologique va dans le sens des hypothèses émises par les modèles basés sur l’usage : la variation phonologique est à un stade précoce mémorisée à l’intérieur de constructions spécifiques, particulièrement fréquentes et saillantes dans le DAE. Celles-ci vont ensuite s’abstraire et entrer en concurrence au cours du développement, ces deux phénomènes étant particulièrement sensibles aux facteurs d’usage, notamment la fréquence d’emploi des types et des formes linguistiques. / This study deals with the usage of two French linguistic variables liaison and elision, which are traditionally described as phonological variables. They are studied during natural interactions between three children and their parents. More precisely, the aim of this thesis is to describe the specificities of the child directed speech (CDS) concerning the usage of liaison and elision to measure their impact on the emergence of these phonological variables in the speech of the children. After the presentation of the theoretical context of the study (Usage-Based Models and Construction Grammar) and the methodology used to collect, structure, and analyse the data, the research is divided into three analysis sections. The aim of the first corpus based study, a descriptive one, is twofold. The first objective is to describe the variation to which children are exposed at home. A second objective is to compare the results of previous studies on liaison acquisition, obtained mainly from experimental tasks, with data extracted from dense corpora collected during natural interactions between the children and their parents. In particular, this study shows that usage factors, including the frequency of items, influence the production of phonological variables. The second study focuses on the specificities of CDS. The results show that the usage of phonological variables is modulated in CDS, essentially at an early stage of language acquisition. Then, this modulation attenuates during the child’s development. The aim of the third study is to connect parent’s productions and children’s productions. It appears that the results concerning the development of phonological variation are in step with the assumptions provided by the usage-based models: at an early stage, the variation is memorized into specific constructions, particularly salient and frequent in CDS. Then, these constructions are abstracted and enter into competition with each other during the course of language development. The children’s productions show that these two phenomena are especially sensitive to usage factors, including type and token frequency.

Äldreriktat tal avser kommunikationsanpassningar gentemot äldre liknande de som görs till små barn. Anpassningarna sker inom flera språkliga domäner och är en del av äldres kommunikativa miljö. Ämnet är relativt outforskat och få eller inga studier har gjorts i Sverige. Föreliggande studies syfte var att undersöka eventuell förekomst av äldreriktat tal, samt beskriva dess karakteristika då personal på olika typer av boenden för äldre samtalar med en äldre. Deltagare är fem personer som arbetar på olika former av boenden för äldre. Samtal mellan personal och äldre samt samtal mellan personal och en kollega spelades in och grovtranskriberades. Inspelningarna klipptes till filer utifrån varje analys syfte. Arbetet antog en datadriven ansats och data studerades utifrån tidigare forskning kring äldreriktat och barnriktat tal. I föreliggande studie påvisades att deltagande personal på boende för äldre, i varierande grad, anpassade sin kommunikation inom flera språkliga domäner. Anpassningarna förekom huvudsakligen inom den prosodiska domänen men förekom i viss utsträckning även inom den grammatiska. Anpassningar inom den pragmatiska domänen påvisades till viss del medan anpassningar inom den semantiska domänen ej förekom. Tendenser till talanpassningar förekom hos majoriteten av deltagarna. Följande tillägg av delaspekter till äldreriktat tal föreslås; upprepat användande av namn, mindre samtidigt tal och färre tvekfenomen. / The term elderspeak refers to the adjustments of communication towards elderly people which are similar to those made towards young children. The adjustments are made within several language domains, and are a part of the communicative environment of the elders. The subject is relatively uninvestigated, and few, if any, studies have been conducted on the subject in Sweden. Thus the aim of the present study was to investigate the possible occurrence of elderspeak, and to describe its characteristics. The present study is based upon five participants working at different forms of geriatric institutions. Conversations between a caregiver and a resident and conversations between a caregiver and a colleague were recorded and broadly transcribed. The recordings were cut into separate files according to the purpose of respective analysis. The study was carried out with a data-driven perspective and previously established aspects of elderspeak and child directed speech was searched for. The present study established that caregivers to a varying extent adjusted their communication within several language domains. The adjustments mainly took place within the prosodic domain but they also took place within the grammatical domain. Adjustments within the pragmatic domain were found to some extent, but no adjustments within the semantic domain were found. Tendencies to adjustments of the speech were present in the majority of the participants. The present study suggests the following additions to the aspects of the elderspeak phenomenon; frequent use of name, less hesitation phenomena and less frequent simultaneous speech.

Child-directed speech (CDS) differs from adult-directed speech (ADS) in several respects whose possible facilitating effects for language acquisition are still being studied. One such difference concerns articulation rate --- the number of linguistic units by the number of time units, excluding pauses --- which has been shown to be generally lower than in ADS. However, while it is well-established that ADS exhibits an inverse relation between articulation rate and information-theoretic surprisal --- the amount of information encoded in a linguistic unit --- this measure has been conspicuously absent in the study of articulation rate in CDS. Another issue is if the lower articulation rate in CDS is stable across utterances or an effect of local variation, such as final lengthening. The aim of this work is to arrive at a more comprehensive model of articulation rate in CDS by including surprisal and final lengthening. In particular, one-word utterances were studied, also in relation to word-length effects (the phenomenon that longer words generally have a higher articulation rate). To this end, a methodology for large-scale automatic phoneme-alignment was developed, which was applied to two longitudinal corpora of Swedish CDS. It was investigated i) how articulation rate in CDS varied with respect to child age, ii) whether there was a negative relation between articulation rate and surprisal in CDS, and iii) to what extent articulation rate was lower in CDS than in ADS. The results showed i) a weak positive effectof child age on articulation rate, ii) a negative relation between articulation rate and surprisal, and iii) that there was a lower articulation rate in CDS but that the difference could almost exclusively be attributed to one-word utterances and final lengthening. In other words, adults seem to adapt how fast they speak to their children's age, speaking faster to children is correlated with a reduced amount of information, and the difference in articulation rate between CDS and ADS is most prominent in isolated words and final lengthening. More generally, the results suggest that CDS is well-suited for word segmentation, since lower articulation rate in one-word utterances provides an additional cue.

The diploma thesis discusses family communications during Mealtimes. The first part defines the basic theoretical concepts of the theory of children's speech and research associated with it, it defines preschool child development with an emphasis on language and further defines the concept of family communication and child directed speech. At the end of the theoretical part the thesis explains the importance of food/meals in family life. The theoretical part is mainly based on professional literature. The second part consists of five case studies that focus on the analysis of video communications during family meals. All families that participated on the recording signed a consent. The information was also obtained with the help of sociologically oriented survey about adult participants. All recordings were transcribed according to the CHAT system guidelines, which is part of the CHILDES database. The results are compared with the findings of the professional literature. Keywords communication, pre-school child, child directes speech, food/meals

The following diploma thesis addresses linguistic speech in the children's program at the Radio Junior Club. The first section describes verbal expressions, defines basic theoretical concepts related to the stratification of Czech language, defines child listeners with a focus on the pre-school development period as well as the primary and middle school period and also explains the concept of child-oriented speech. The structure of Czech Radio and individual programs at Radio Junior with emphasis on the Radio Junior Club are described at the end of the theoretical section. The practical section contains two analyses describing the moderator's language and how it is responded to positively according to sound level, lexicology, morphology and syntax. The recordings were taken from the Czech Radio archive and the ORAL2013 transcriptional system, which was adapted for analysis purposes, was used to transcribe the spoken language. The results of the analyses were compared and generalized along with findings in expert literature.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(文学) / 甲第21285号 / 文博第773号 / 新制||文||662(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院文学研究科行動文化学専攻 / (主査)教授 板倉 昭二, 教授 蘆田 宏, 准教授 森口 佑介 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Letters / Kyoto University / DGAM

The main results of the PhD thesis are described in the summary. The main objective of the thesis is to define the acquisition of lexical and morphosyntactic features of Lithuanian adjective. The analysis is based on the large quantity of linguistic data (~ 400 000 words), which is the corpus of four children compiled according the method of longitudinal observation. The study has interchangeably applied several methods of analysis: longitudinal observation, corpus linguistics, error analysis and comparative method. Statements to be Defended 1. Lexical features of adjectives are acquired by children with difficulties: they often confuse adjectives of a single semantic group and make many errors. 2. Children easily acquire morphosyntactic features of adjectives: they do not make many errors. Some errors may be observed only in cases, when adjective paradigms do not coincide with noun paradigms. 3. Lexical and morphosyntactic features of adjectives are acquired simultaneously. The meaning of adjective is realised only when multi-word combinations and morphosyntactic features have been acquired. 4. The acquisition of adjectives correlates with the individual language development. Bigger lexical variety of adjectives is more characteristic to children with early and late language development, if compared to children with typical language development. Morphosyntactic features of adjectives do not pose problems to children with late language development. 5. The acquisition of... [to full text] / Santraukoje pateikiami pagrindiniai disertacinio tyrimo metu gauti rezultatai. Aprašomo tyrimo tikslas – išanalizuoti leksines ir morfosintaksines lietuvių kalbos būdvardžio įsisavinimo ypatybes. Tyrimui pasirinktas didelės apimties šaltinis – keturių vaikų kalbos tekstynas (~ 400 000 žodžių), sukauptas ilgalaikio stebėjimo metodu. Tyrimas atliktas taikant ir derinant kelis metodus: ilgalaikio stebėjimo, tekstynų lingvistikos, klaidų analizės ir lyginamąjį. Atlikus tyrimą darbe pagrindžiami šie ginamieji teiginiai: 1. Vaikams sudėtinga įsisavinti būdvardžio leksines ypatybes: dažnai painiojami vienos leksinės semantinės grupės būdvardžiai, daroma daug klaidų. 2. Vaikai lengvai įsisavina morfosintaksines būdvardžio ypatybes: klaidų nėra daug, dažniau klystama tik retų paradigmų būdvardžius derinant su daiktavardžiais. 3. Būdvardžio leksinės ir morfosintaksinės ypatybės įsisavinamos drauge. Būdvardžio reikšmė suvokiama tik pradėjus vartoti keliažodžius pasakymus, įsisavinus gramatines ypatybes. 4. Būdvardžio įsisavinimas susijęs su individualia vaiko kalbos raida. Ankstyvajai ir vėlyvajai kalbos raidai būdinga didesnė būdvardžių leksinė įvairovė nei įprastai kalbos raidai, o vaikams, kurių kalbos raida vėlyva, nesudėtinga įsisavinti būdvardžio morfosintaksinius požymius. 5. Būdvardžio įsisavinimą veikia ne tik aplinkos veiksniai (vaikiškoji kalba), bet ir kalbos sistema. Kaip ir įsisavinant kitas kalbos dalis, vaikų kalboje vyrauja vaikiškojoje kalboje dažniausiai vartojamos... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

Disertacijoje aprašomo tyrimo tikslas – išanalizuoti leksines ir morfosintaksines lietuvių kalbos būdvardžio įsisavinimo ypatybes. Tyrimui pasirinktas didelės apimties šaltinis – keturių vaikų kalbos tekstynas (~ 400 000 žodžių), sukauptas ilgalaikio stebėjimo metodu. Tyrimas atliktas taikant ir derinant kelis metodus: ilgalaikio stebėjimo, tekstynų lingvistikos, klaidų analizės ir lyginamąjį. Atlikus tyrimą darbe pagrindžiami šie ginamieji teiginiai: 1. Vaikams sudėtinga įsisavinti būdvardžio leksines ypatybes: dažnai painiojami vienos leksinės semantinės grupės būdvardžiai, daroma daug klaidų. 2. Vaikai lengvai įsisavina morfosintaksines būdvardžio ypatybes: klaidų nėra daug, dažniau klystama tik retų paradigmų būdvardžius derinant su daiktavardžiais. 3. Būdvardžio leksinės ir morfosintaksinės ypatybės įsisavinamos drauge. Būdvardžio reikšmė suvokiama tik pradėjus vartoti keliažodžius pasakymus, įsisavinus gramatines ypatybes. 4. Būdvardžio įsisavinimas susijęs su individualia vaiko kalbos raida. Ankstyvajai ir vėlyvajai kalbos raidai būdinga didesnė būdvardžių leksinė įvairovė nei įprastai kalbos raidai, o vaikams, kurių kalbos raida vėlyva, nesudėtinga įsisavinti būdvardžio morfosintaksinius požymius. 5. Būdvardžio įsisavinimą veikia ne tik aplinkos veiksniai (vaikiškoji kalba), bet ir kalbos sistema. Kaip ir įsisavinant kitas kalbos dalis, vaikų kalboje vyrauja vaikiškojoje kalboje dažniausiai vartojamos būdvardžio leksemos ir gramatinės kategorijos. Kalbos sistema... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The main objective of the study is to define the acquisition of lexical and morphosyntactic features of Lithuanian adjective. The analysis is based on the large quantity of linguistic data (~ 400 000 words), which is the corpus of four children compiled according the method of longitudinal observation. The study has interchangeably applied several methods of analysis: longitudinal observation, corpus linguistics, error analysis and comparative method. Statements to be Defended 1. Lexical features of adjectives are acquired by children with difficulties: they often confuse adjectives of a single semantic group and make many errors. 2. Children easily acquire morphosyntactic features of adjectives: they do not make many errors. Some errors may be observed only in cases, when adjective paradigms do not coincide with noun paradigms. 3. Lexical and morphosyntactic features of adjectives are acquired simultaneously. The meaning of adjective is realised only when multi-word combinations and morphosyntactic features have been acquired. 4. The acquisition of adjectives correlates with the individual language development. Bigger lexical variety of adjectives is more characteristic to children with early and late language development, if compared to children with typical language development. Morphosyntactic features of adjectives do not pose problems to children with late language development. 5. The acquisition of adjective is influenced by the input, as well as by the linguistic... [to full text]

Unga barn föredrar redan från födseln att lyssna till positivt tal, vilket karaktäriserar barnriktat tal. Idenna studie kontrasterades neutral och positiv känsla i ett ordinlärningsparadigm där tittiden hos 16-månader gamla, svensktalande barn (N=12) analyserades när de testades på två påhittade ord.Målorden presenterades antingen i positivt barnriktat tal eller neutralt barnriktat tal. Detta gjordes föratt se om det positiva barnriktade talet underlättar inlärningen av nya ord. Deras tittid på detefterfrågade objektet analyserades sedan med en tvåvägs-ANOVA. Det fanns inga signifikantaskillnader mellan röstlägena. Slutsatsen som drogs var att hypotesen, att tittiden för det objekt sompresenteras i positivt tal är längre, inte kunde bekräftas men inte heller förkastas på grund av problemmed datainsamlingen samt dataanalysen. Inför framtida studier rekommenderas att utöka antaletdeltagare, samt undersöka andra variabler som kan påverka den tidiga ordinlärningen. / Already from birth young children prefer to listen to positive speech, which is a characteristic of childdirected speech. In this study neutral and positive tone was contrasted in a word-learning paradigmwhere the eye-movement of 16-month-old Swedish speaking children (N= 12) were analysed whenthey were tested on two made-up words. The words were either presented in neutral child-directedspeech or positive child-directed speech. This was done to see if the early word-learning is facilitatedby positive tone. The looking time was then analysed by a two-way ANOVA, and there was nosignificant difference between the two emotions. The conclusion drawn was that the hypothesis, thatthe looking time of the children that presented with positive child-directed speech would be longer,could not be confirmed nor rejected due to problems with collecting data and data analysis. Prior tofuture studies it is recommended to expand the number of participants, as well as examine othervariables that may affect early word learning.

In this thesis, the usage of iconic expressions, or sound symbolic expressions, is investigated in Swedish child-directed speech during the first two years of life. Furthermore, it is explored whether there is an effect of the usage of sound symbolism on productive vocabulary at 2;0 years. Ten monolingual Swedish and typically-developing children and their parents were selected at the ages of 0;3, 0;6, 0;9, 1;0, 1;3, 1;6, 1;9 and 2;0 years. The sound symbolic expressions were extracted, classified and analysed. One finding is that sound symbolic expressions are used by all parents in varying degrees from sparsely to abundantly. On average 0,9 sound symbolic expressions were used per minute by all parents. There was no significant effect of the usage of sound symbolism on productive vocabulary. Nevertheless, this work shows that iconicity is used in early childhood and might be a part of the register child-directed speech. Further studies should investigate more thoroughly the effect of iconicity on language acquisition. / I denna studie undersöktes ikoniska, eller ljudsymboliska, uttryck i svenskt barnrikat tal under barnets första två levnadsår. Utöver detta testades det om det fanns någon effekt av användning av ljudsymbolik på barnets produktiva ordförråd vid 2;0 år. Tio enspråkiga svenska och typiskt-utvecklade barn och deras föräldrar valdes ut vid 0;3, 0;6, 0;9, 1;0, 1;3, 1;6, 1;9 och 2;0 år och de ljudsymboliska uttrycken extraherades, klassificerades och analyserades. Ett resultat var att alla föräldrar använde sig av ljudsymboliska uttryck; varierande från lite till mycket. I genomsnitt användes det 0,9 ljudsymboliska uttryck per minut av alla föräldrarna. Ingen signifikant effekt på det produktiva ordförrådet kunde hittas. Trots detta så visar detta arbete att ikonicitet används under den tidiga barndomen och att ikonicitet kanske är en del av talstilen ‘barnriktat tal’. Framtida forskning kan undersöka ikonicitetens påverkan på språkinlärning mer ingående. / Modelling infant language acquisition from parent-child interaction (MINT)