We present a new set of 96 Swedish multi-word expressions annotated with degree of (non-)compositionality. In contrast to most previous compositionality datasets we also consider syntactically complex constructions and publish a formal specification of each expression. This allows evaluation of computational models beyond word bigrams, which have so far been the norm. Finally, we use the annotations to evaluate a system for automatic compositionality estimation based on distributional semantics. Our analysis of the disagreements between human annotators and the distributional model reveal interesting questions related to the perception of compositionality, and should be informative to future work in the area.

Distributional learning is a perceptual process hypothesized to underlie the phenomena of phonetic recalibration and selective adaptation, as well as infant speech sound category learning. However, in order to be conclusively tied to the earliest stages of speech sound category development, that is, the formation of novel perceptual categories, distributional learning must be shown to operate on stimuli for which there are no pre-existing categories. We investigated this in a previous study, finding no evidence of distributional learning in adults from unattended listening to non-speech. Since attention to stimuli impacts distributional learning, the present study focused on distributional learning from attended listening to non-speech. The same paradigm was used as in the previous study, except that participants’ attention was directed towards stimuli by means of a cover task. Non-speech stimuli were spectrally rotated vowels and the mismatch negativity was used to measure perceptual categorization. No distributional learning was found, that is, no effect of attention on distributional learning was demonstrated. This could mean that the distributional learning process does not operate on stimuli where perceptual categories do not already exist, or that the mismatch negativity measure does not capture the earliest stages of perceptual category development.

In earlier work, we have shown that articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech (CDS) increases as a function of the age of the child, even when utterance length and differences in articulation rate between subjects are controlled for. In this paper we show on utterance level in spontaneous Swedish speech that i) for the youngest children, articulation rate in CDS is lower than in adult-directed speech (ADS), ii) there is a significant negative correlation between articulation rate and surprisal (the negative log probability) in ADS, and iii) the increase in articulation rate in Swedish CDS as a function of the age of the child holds, even when surprisal along with utterance length and differences in articulation rate between speakers are controlled for. These results indicate that adults adjust their articulation rate to make it fit the linguistic capacity of the child.

The aim of the present study is to further the understanding of the relationship between perceptual categorization and exposure to different frequency distributions of sounds. Previous studies have shown that speech sound discrimination proficiency is in- fluenced by exposure to different distributions of speech sound continua varying along one or several acoustic dimensions, both in adults and in infants. In the current study, adults were presented with either a bimodal or a unimodal frequency distri- bution of spectrally rotated sounds along a continuum (a vowel continuum before rotation). Categorization of the sounds, quantified as amplitude of the event-related potential (ERP) component mismatch negativity (MMN) in response to two of the sounds, was measured before and after exposure. It was expected that the bimodal group would have a larger MMN amplitude after exposure whereas the unimodal group would have a smaller MMN amplitude after exposure. Contrary to expectations, the MMN amplitude was smaller overall after exposure, and no difference was found between groups. This suggests that either the previously reported sensitivity to frequency distributions of speech sounds is not present for non-speech sounds, or the MMN amplitude is not a sensitive enough measure of categorization to detect an influence from passive exposure, or both.

It has been shown that articulation rate (AR), the number of produced linguistic units per time unit with pauses excluded, is lower in child-directed speech (CDS) than in adult-directed speech (ADS). The present study is the first corpus-based longitudinal study to investigate AR in Swedish CDS as a function of child age while also control-ling for utterance length in terms of number of syllables and for individual differences between speakers. AR in transcribed utterances of 7 parents directed at their respective child during different ages was analyzed with mixed effects modeling. Results show a signif-icantly higher AR in longer than in shorter utterances and a significant increase in AR as a function of infant age. Future studies include comparison with entropy-based measures.

WILD 2015 is the second Workshop on Infant Language Development, held June 10-12 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden. WILD 2015 was organized by Stockholm Babylab and the Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University. About 150 delegates met over three conference days, convening on infant speech perception, social factors of language acquisition, bilingual language development in infancy, early language comprehension and lexical development, neurodevelopmental aspects of language acquisition, methodological issues in infant language research, modeling infant language development, early speech production, and infant-directed speech. Keynote speakers were Alejandrina Cristia, Linda Polka, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Angela D. Friederici and Paula Fikkert.

Organizing this conference would of course not have been possible without our funding agencies Vetenskapsrådet and Riksbankens Jubiléumsfond. We would like to thank Francisco Lacerda, Head of the Department of Linguistics, and the Departmental Board for agreeing to host WILD this year. We would also like to thank the administrative staff for their help and support in this undertaking, especially Ann Lorentz-Baarman and Linda Habermann.

The WILD 2015 Organizing Committee: Ellen Marklund, Iris-Corinna Schwarz, Elísabet Eir Cortes, Johan Sjons, Ulrika Marklund, Tove Gerholm, Kristina Nilsson Björkenstam and Monika Molnar.

Barnriktat tal har en rad unika egenskaper som alla tycks härröra från föräldrarnas (omedvetna) önskan att som mycket som möjligt underlätta språkinlärningen för barnet. En av dessa egenskaper hos barnriktat tal är dess repetitivitet, till exempel i successiva yttranden som följande:

Var kan Kucka vara då?

Var är Kucka?

Var är kaninen som heter Kucka?

I det här papperet studerar vi den lokala repetitiviteten i barnriktat tal, som i litteraturen brukar kallas variationsmängder. Dessa är intressanta genom att de visar de ord och konstruktioner som föräldrarna vid varje tillfälle tycks koncentrera sig på att lära sina barn.

Ett teoretiskt ramverk med bäring på detta är konstruktionsgrammatik, som antar att konstruktioner är inlärningsbara eftersom a) de utgör konventionaliserade form–betydelsepar som b) lärs in gradvis, alltifrån holofraser över schematiska uttryck ("item-based constructions", Tomasello 2003) till vuxenspråkets fullt abstraherbara konstruktioner. Genom att vi har longitudinella data så kan vi fånga i vad mån de successiva konstruktionerna anpassas enligt detta mönster allteftersom barnet blir äldre.

Flera försök till formalisering av begreppet variationsmängd har föreslagits, till exempel Küntay och Slobin (1996), Brodsky et al. (2007) och Onnis et al. (2008). Vanliga krav på en variationsmängd är att den a) utgör successiva yttranden med upp till två mellanliggande yttranden; b) att minst två av de ingående orden upprepas; och c) att yttrandenas intention är konstant. Vi experimenterar med olika värden på a) och använder stället för b) en strängmatchningsmetod som även tar hänsyn till yttrandelängden.

I papperet redovisar vi utfallet av konstruktionstyper baserat på data från en longitudinell korpus med barnriktat tal för tretton barn i åldrar mellan 3 och 33 månader, fördelade på 58 sessioner.

The present study investigates adult imitations of infant vocalizations in a cross-linguistic perspective. Japanese-learning and Swedish-learning infants were recorded at ages 16-21 and 78-79 weeks. Vowel-like utterances (n=210) were selected from the recordings and presented to Japanese (n=3) and Swedish (n=3) adults. The adults were asked to imitate what they heard, simulating a spontaneous feedback situation between caregiver and infant. Formant data (F1 and F2) was extracted from all utterances and validated by comparing original and formant re-synthesized utterances. The data was normalized for fundamental frequency and time, and the accumulated spectral difference was calculated between each infant utterance and each imitation of that utterance. The mean spectral difference was calculated and compared, grouped by native language of infant and adult, as well as age of the infant. Preliminary results show smaller spectral difference in the imitations of older infants compared to imitations of the younger group, regardless of infant and adult native language. This may be explained by the increasing stability and more speech-like quality of infants' vocalizations as they grow older (and thus have been exposed to their native language for a longer period of time), making their utterances easier for adults to imitate.

Speech perception is highly context-dependent. Sounds preceding speech stimuli affect how listeners categorise the stimuli, regardless of whether the context consists of speech or non-speech. This effect is acoustically contrastive; a preceding context with high-frequency acoustic energy tends to skew categorisation towards speech sounds possessing lower-frequency acoustic energy and vice versa (Mann, 1980; Holt, Lotto, Kluender, 2000; Holt, 2005). Partially replicating Holt's study from 2005, the present study investigates the effect of non-linguistic contexts in different frequency bands on speech categorisation. Adult participants (n=15) were exposed to Swedish syllables from a speech continuum ranging from /da/ to /ga/ varying in the onset frequencies of the second and third formants in equal steps. Contexts preceding the speech stimuli consisted of sequences of sine tones distributed in different frequency bands: high, mid and low. Participants were asked to categorise the syllables as /da/ or /ga/. As hypothesised, high frequency contexts shift the category boundary towards /da/, while lower frequency contexts shift the boundary towards /ga/, compared to the mid frequency context.

Infant language acquisition research faces the challenge of dealing with subjects who are unable to provide spoken answers to research questions. To obtain comprehensible data from such subjects eye tracking is a suitable research tool, as the infants’ gaze can be interpreted as behavioural responses. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the amount of training necessary for participants to learn an audio-visual contingency and present anticipatory looking behaviour in response to an auditory stimulus. Infants (n=22) and adults (n=16) were presented with training sequences, every fourth of which was followed by a test sequence. Training sequences contained implicit audio-visual contingencies consisting of a syllable (/da/ or /ga/) followed by an image appearing on the left/right side of the screen. Test sequences were identical to training sequences except that no image appeared. The latency in time to first fixation towards the non-target area during test sequences was used as a measurement of whether the participants had grasped the contingency. Infants were found to present anticipatory looking behaviour after 24 training trials. Adults were found to present anticipatory looking behaviour after 28-36 training trials. In future research a more interactive experiment design will be employed in order to individualise the amount of training, which will increase the time span available for testing.