Large-scale study of speech acts' development in early childhood

Studies of children's language use in the wild (e.g., in the context of child-caregiver social interaction) have been slowed by the time- and resource- consuming task of hand annotating utterances for communicative intents/speech acts. Existing studies have typically focused on investigating ra...

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Main Authors: Abdellah Fourtassi, Eliot Maes, Jeremy Auguste, Laurent Prévot, Mitja Nikolaus
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Carnegie Mellon University Library Publishing Service 2022-10-01
Series:Language Development Research
Online Access:https://lps.library.cmu.edu/LDR/article/id/532/
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author Abdellah Fourtassi
Eliot Maes
Jeremy Auguste
Laurent Prévot
Mitja Nikolaus
author_facet Abdellah Fourtassi
Eliot Maes
Jeremy Auguste
Laurent Prévot
Mitja Nikolaus
author_sort Abdellah Fourtassi
collection DOAJ
description Studies of children's language use in the wild (e.g., in the context of child-caregiver social interaction) have been slowed by the time- and resource- consuming task of hand annotating utterances for communicative intents/speech acts. Existing studies have typically focused on investigating rather small samples of children, raising the question of how their findings generalize both to larger and more representative populations and to a richer set of interaction contexts. Here we propose a simple automatic model for speech act labeling in early childhood based on the INCA-A coding scheme (Ninio, Snow, Pan, & Rollins, 1994).. After validating the model against ground truth labels, we automatically annotated the entire English-language data from the CHILDES corpus. The major theoretical result was that earlier findings generalize quite well at a large scale. Further, we introduced two complementary measures for the age of acquisition of speech acts which allows us to rank different speech acts according to their order of emergence in production and comprehension.Our model will be shared with the community so that researchers can use it with their data to investigate various question related to language use both in typical and atypical populations of children.
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spelling doaj.art-78ff63dc1b274ee8975964d55a536c452024-02-19T12:29:55ZengCarnegie Mellon University Library Publishing ServiceLanguage Development Research2771-79762022-10-012110.34842/2022.0532Large-scale study of speech acts' development in early childhoodAbdellah Fourtassi0Eliot Maes1Jeremy Auguste2Laurent Prévot3Mitja Nikolaus4Aix-Marseille UniversityAix-Marseille UniversityAix-Marseille UniversityAix-Marseille UniversityLIS/LPL, Aix-Marseille UniversityStudies of children's language use in the wild (e.g., in the context of child-caregiver social interaction) have been slowed by the time- and resource- consuming task of hand annotating utterances for communicative intents/speech acts. Existing studies have typically focused on investigating rather small samples of children, raising the question of how their findings generalize both to larger and more representative populations and to a richer set of interaction contexts. Here we propose a simple automatic model for speech act labeling in early childhood based on the INCA-A coding scheme (Ninio, Snow, Pan, & Rollins, 1994).. After validating the model against ground truth labels, we automatically annotated the entire English-language data from the CHILDES corpus. The major theoretical result was that earlier findings generalize quite well at a large scale. Further, we introduced two complementary measures for the age of acquisition of speech acts which allows us to rank different speech acts according to their order of emergence in production and comprehension.Our model will be shared with the community so that researchers can use it with their data to investigate various question related to language use both in typical and atypical populations of children.https://lps.library.cmu.edu/LDR/article/id/532/
spellingShingle Abdellah Fourtassi
Eliot Maes
Jeremy Auguste
Laurent Prévot
Mitja Nikolaus
Large-scale study of speech acts' development in early childhood
Language Development Research
title Large-scale study of speech acts' development in early childhood
title_full Large-scale study of speech acts' development in early childhood
title_fullStr Large-scale study of speech acts' development in early childhood
title_full_unstemmed Large-scale study of speech acts' development in early childhood
title_short Large-scale study of speech acts' development in early childhood
title_sort large scale study of speech acts development in early childhood
url https://lps.library.cmu.edu/LDR/article/id/532/
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