Speech directed to children differs from adult-directed speech in linguistic aspects such as repetition, word choice, and sentence length, as well as in aspects of the speech signal itself, such as prosodic and phonemic variation. Human language acquisition research indicates that child-directed speech helps language learners. This study explores the effect of child-directed speech when learning to extract semantic information from speech directly. We compare the task performance of models trained on adult-directed speech (ADS) and child-directed speech (CDS). We find indications that CDS helps in the initial stages of learning, but eventually, models trained on ADS reach comparable task performance, and generalize better. The results suggest that this is at least partially due to linguistic rather than acoustic properties of the two registers, as we see the same pattern when looking at models trained on acoustically comparable synthetic speech.
翻译:以儿童为对象的演讲在语言方面不同于以成人为对象的演讲,如重复、单词选择和刑期长度,以及语言信号本身的某些方面,如预言和电话变异。人类语言获取研究表明,以儿童为对象的演讲有助于语言学习者。本研究报告探讨了在学习直接从语言中提取语义信息时,以儿童为对象的演讲的影响。我们比较了在成人语言(ADS)和以儿童为对象的演讲(CDS)方面受过培训的模型的任务表现。我们发现有迹象表明,CDS在最初的学习阶段有所帮助,但最终,关于ADS的模型达到了可比较的工作表现,并作了更好的概括。结果显示,这至少部分是由于两种登记册的语言特性,而不是声学特性。我们在研究关于具有声学可比性的合成演讲的模型时看到同样的模式。