A recent study by Polka, Rvachew, and Molnar (2008) found that 6- to 8-month-old infants do not discriminate a simple native consonant-vowel contrast when familiarized to it in the presence of distraction noise (i.e., recordings of crickets and birds chirping), even when testing was conducted in quiet. Because the distraction noise did not overlap with the phonemes' frequencies, failure to encode the familiarization phoneme could be due more to a disruption in infant attention than to direct masking effects. Given that infants learn speech under natural conditions involving noise and distraction, it is important to identify factors that may 'protect' their speech perception under non-ideal listening conditions. The current study investigated three possible factors: speech register, face information, and speaker gender. Six-month-old infants watched a video of a female speaker producing a native phoneme in either an adult-directed or infant-directed manner accompanied by the same background noise as in Polka et al. (2008). After habituation, infants were tested with alternating trials of the familiar phoneme and a novel phoneme in quiet. Phoneme discrimination was measured by recording infants' heart rate and looking times during familiar and novel trials. Discrimination was poor in infants who viewed a female speaker using adult-directed speech but was significantly improved (as seen in both dependent measures of attention) when the female speaker used infant-directed speech. Results indicate that common factors in the typical environment of infants can promote speech perception abilities in noise. / Master of Science

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

Jusqu’à l’âge de 4 ans, les enfants francophones et anglophones se désignent et désignent leur interlocuteur à l’aide de formes différentes standard et non standard de référence à soi et à l’autre. Par le passé, des paramètres d’ordres sémantique, morphosyntaxique et pragmatique ont été étudiés, afin d’identifier les facteurs en jeu dans la production de ces différentes formes. Dans cette étude, nous analysons le rôle du langage adressé à l’enfant, par les parents. Des études précédentes ont en effet suggéré que les usages à la fois standard et non standard de référence à soi et à l’enfant-interlocuteur pouvaient jouer un rôle dans le processus d’acquisition des pronoms personnels (cf. Rabain-Jamin et Sabeau-Jouannet, 1989; Budwig, 1996; Kirjavainen et al., 2009; Morgenstern, 2011). Aucune étude systématique des énoncés des parents adressés à l’enfant n’a cependant été réalisée à ce jour. Pour apporter des éléments de réponse à cette question, nous analysons les données issues de 4 corpus de la base de données CHILDES. Ces corpus sont constitués d’enregistrements vidéo mensuels d’interactions libres dans 2 dyades francophones et 2 dyades anglophones. Partant des formes non standard de référence à soi et à l’interlocuteur produites par les enfants, nous questionnons d’une part l’influence de la fréquence de formes et de constructions similaires dans l’input, sur les productions des enfants. Observant d’autre part que les enfants emploient des formes différentes dans des contextes différents, nous nous demandons si ces associations forme-fonction sont présentes dans l’input ou si elles sont créées par l’enfant. Notre méthode d’analyse se situe donc au croisement des approches constructivistes et fonctionnalistes du processus d’acquisition du langage. Nos observations suggèrent que les productions des enfants reflètent à la fois les spécificités de l’input et leurs propres analyses du langage qui leur est adressé. Progressivement, l’input des enfants se fait plus important et plus diversifié et les enfants acquièrent de nouveaux outils pour exprimer leurs intentions communicatives. Ils sont alors en mesure de se désigner comme locuteur et de désigner leur interlocuteur en tant que tel, quelle que soit la situation. / Before the age of 4, English- and French-speaking children use standard and non standard forms to refer to themselves and their addressee. In the past, several semantic, morphosyntactic and pragmatic parameters have been investigated as potential factors responsible for these various forms. In the present study, we examine the role of parental speech on children’s productions. Previous research has in fact suggested that parents’ standard as well as non standard ways of referring to themselves and their child when addressing her, may play a role in the process of pronoun acquisition (cf. Rabain-Jamin and Sabeau-Jouannet, 1989; Budwig, 1996; Kirjavainen et al., 2009; Morgenstern, 2011). However, no systematic study of the speech parents address to their child has been conducted. To tackle this issue, we perform analyses on 4 corpora from the CHILDES database, composed of monthly video-recorded interactions in 2 French-speaking and 2 English-speaking dyads. Taking the children’s non standard ways of referring to themselves and their interlocutor as our starting point, we first question the influence of the frequency of similar forms and constructions observed in the input, on the children’s productions. Observing that the children use different forms in different contexts, we then ask whether these form-function associations can also be found in the input or whether children create them. Our method therefore combines constructivist approaches and functionalist approaches to the process of language acquisition. Our observations suggest that children’s productions reflect both the specificities of the surrounding input and their own linguistic and cognitive analyses. As they observe and use more and more language, acquire additional linguistic means of expressing their communicative intentions, and as the input and feedback they receive becomes diversified, children gradually come to refer to themselves as speakers and to their addressees as interlocutors.

Existing literature demonstrates that infants can discriminate between categories of infant-directed (ID) speech based on the speaker’s intended message – that is, infants recognize the difference between comforting and approving ID speech, and treat different utterances from within these two categories similarly. Furthermore, the literature also demonstrates that infants understand many aspects of music and can discriminate between happy and sad music. Building on these findings, the present study investigated whether exposure to happy or sad piano music would systematically affect infants’ preferences for comforting or approving ID speech. Five- to nine-month-old infants’ preferences for comforting or approving ID speech were examined as a function of whether infants were exposed to sad or happy piano music. Seventeen (10 male, 7 female) full-term, healthy infants were included in the study. It was hypothesized that relative to infants exposed to happy music, infants exposed to sad music would demonstrate a stronger desire to hear comforting ID speech. The study employed an infant controlled, preferential looking procedure to test this hypothesis. The results of the study did not statistically support the researchers’ hypotheses. Limitations of the present work and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Modifications to speech production made by adult talkers in response to instructions to speak clearly have been well documented in the literature. Targeting adult populations has been motivated by efforts to improve speech production for the benefit of the communication partners, however, many adults also have communication partners who are children. Surprisingly, there is limited literature on whether children can change their speech production when cued to speak clearly. Pettinato, Tuomainen, Granlund, and Hazan (2016) showed that by age 12, children exhibited enlarged vowel space areas and reduced articulation rate when prompted to speak clearly, but did not produce any other adult-like clear speech modifications in connected speech. Moreover, Syrett and Kawahara (2013) suggested that preschoolers produced longer and more intense vowels when prompted to speak clearly at the word level. These findings contrasted with adult talkers who show significant temporal and spectral differences between speech produced in control and clear speech conditions. Therefore, it was the purpose of this study to analyze changes in temporal and spectral characteristics of speech production that children aged 6-10 made in these experimental conditions. It is important to elucidate the clear speech profile of this population to better understand which adult-like clear speech modifications they make spontaneously and which modifications are still developing. Understanding these baselines will advance future studies that measure the impact of more explicit instructions and children's abilities to better accommodate their interlocutors, which is a critical component of children’s pragmatic and speech-motor development.

This diploma thesis deals with communication in kindergarten in selected communicative situations. The first part defines basic theoretical terms and, based on previous research, summarizes findings about pre-school education and mental and language development in pre- school children. The thesis also explains factors that influence language acquisition, child directed speech and pedagogical communication. The second part's main focus lies in describing communicative situations and in qualitative analysis of the acquired data - video recordings of selected communicative situation. The pocess of recording took place after previous agreement with two kindergartens. The recordings were transcribed according to the modified manual for the DIALOG database. The analysis is focused on the nature of the pedagogical communication in kindergarten. Our findings were compared to previous research results. Keywords communication, pedagogical communication, language acquisition, child directed speech, kindergarten

“Anaphora” is a label used for a referential expression that connects one entity (e.g. a pronoun) to another previously established entity (e.g. a proper name). The previously established entity is called an antecedent. The use of anaphora will, in this study, be referred to as referential behaviour. The study was based around audio and video recordings of free play between a Swedish parent and his/her child. 10 parents and their children were recorded. The referential behaviour of the parents was analysed. The sessions took place when the children were 3, 6, 9 and 12 months old. Recent studies indicate that speech directed at children during a child's first six months contains a larger amount of pronouns than the speech directed at children between 6 and 12 months of age. The purpose of the study was to examine if the decline of pronouns was visible in Swedish child- directed speech, and to see how different types of anaphora appeared in the same speech. Correlations between the visible changes of different types of referential expressions were also examined. A drop in the use of anaphoric pronoun with an explicit antecedent was found for the last two ages, which confirmed the study’s hypothesis. The results were also compared to each child’s vocabulary development.

The present study was designed to investigate whether infants prefer their fathers’ voices over an unfamiliar male voice within the context of normal father-infant interaction, i.e., infant-directed (ID) speech. Twenty Caucasian male and female four-month-olds were tested in a visual-fixation preference procedure. Attentional preference was measured by the amount of time the infants watched a visual stimulus. It was found that infants did not show greater attentional or affective responsiveness to paternal ID over unfamiliar male ID speech samples. However, mothers and fathers appear to be very similar in their perception of father-infant interaction. According to these results, four-month-olds do not prefer their fathers’ voices to that of an unfamiliar male. This finding contrast sharply with the literature on maternal voice preference. The data was interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that multimodal stimulus cues are necessary for paternal voice recognition in infancy. / Master of Science

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.

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.