ArticleScientific reports2021
Child-directed speech is optimized for syntax-free semantic inference.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Child-Directed Speech Is Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Metaphoricity and Concreteness.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Sequence structure in children's speech reveals non-linear development of relations between word categories.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The function and evolution of child-directed communication.PLoS biology · 2022Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The way infants learn language is a highly complex adaptive behavior. This behavior chiefly relies on the ability to extract information from the speech they hear and combine it with information from the external environment. Most theories assume that this ability critically hinges on the recognition of at least some syntactic structure. Here, we show that child-directed speech allows for semantic inference without relying on explicit structural information. We simulate the process of semantic inference with machine learning applied to large text collections of two different types of speech, child-directed speech versus adult-directed speech. Taking the core meaning of causality as a test case, we find that in child-directed speech causal meaning can be successfully inferred from simple co-occurrences of neighboring words. By contrast, semantic inference in adult-directed speech fundamentally requires additional access to syntactic structure. These results suggest that child-directed speech is ideally shaped for a learner who has not yet mastered syntactic structure.
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