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Predicting the birth of a spoken word

2015; National Academy of Sciences; Volume: 112; Issue: 41 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1073/pnas.1419773112

1091-6490

Brandon Roy, Michael C. Frank, Philip DeCamp, Matthew P. Miller, Deb Roy,

Speech and dialogue systems

Significance The emergence of productive language is a critical milestone in a child’s life. Laboratory studies have identified many individual factors that contribute to word learning, and larger scale studies show correlations between aspects of the home environment and language outcomes. To date, no study has compared across many factors involved in word learning. We introduce a new ultradense set of recordings that capture a single child’s daily experience during the emergence of language. We show that words used in distinctive spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts are produced earlier, suggesting they are easier to learn. These findings support the importance of multimodal context in word learning for one child and provide new methods for quantifying the quality of children’s language input.