5 papers
CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child-Adult InTeractions
Francesca Padovani, Xiulin Yang, Bastian Bunzeck +4
CHILDES is a paramount resource for language acquisition studies -- yet computational tools for analyzing its syntactic structure remain limited. Leveraging the recent release of t…
Is Child-Directed Language Optimized for Word Learning? A Computational Study of Verb Meaning Acquisition
Francesca Padovani, Jaap Jumelet, Yevgen Matusevych +1
Is child-directed language (CDL) optimized to support language learning, and which aspects of linguistic development does it facilitate? We investigate this question using neural l…
Generating Completions for Broca's Aphasic Sentences Using Large Language Models
Sijbren van Vaals, Yevgen Matusevych, Frank Tsiwah
Broca's aphasia is a type of aphasia characterized by non-fluent, effortful and agrammatic speech production with relatively good comprehension. Since traditional aphasia treatment…
The mutual exclusivity bias of bilingual visually grounded speech models
Dan Oneata, Leanne Nortje, Yevgen Matusevych +1
Mutual exclusivity (ME) is a strategy where a novel word is associated with a novel object rather than a familiar one, facilitating language learning in children. Recent work has f…
Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models
Francesca Padovani, Jaap Jumelet, Yevgen Matusevych +1
Seminal work by Huebner et al. (2021) showed that language models (LMs) trained on English Child-Directed Language (CDL) can reach similar syntactic abilities as LMs trained on muc…