Thailand

Babies’ daily auditory environment plays a crucial role in language development. Most previous research estimating the quantitative and qualitative aspects of early speech inputs has predominantly focused on English- and Spanish-speaking families. In addition, validation studies for daylong recordings&#39; analysis tools are scarce on French data sets. In this paper, we present a French corpus of daylong audio recordings longitudinally collected with the LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) system from infants aged 3 to 24 months. We conduct a thorough exploration of this data set, which serves as a quality check for both the data and the analysis tools. We evaluate the reliability of LENA metrics by systematically comparing them with those obtained from the ChildProject set of tools and by checking the known dynamics of the metrics with age. These metrics are also used to replicate, on our data set, findings from (Warlaumont et al, 2014) about the increase of infants&#39; speech vocalizations and temporal contingencies between infants and caregivers with age

ACL 2024

Daily auditory environments in French-speaking infants: A longitudinal dataset

daylong recordings

french

Babies’ daily auditory environment plays a crucial role in language development. Most previous research estimating the quantitative and qualitative aspects of early speech inputs has predominantly focused on English- and Spanish-speaking families. In addition, validation studies for daylong recordings' analysis tools are scarce on French data sets. In this paper, we present a French corpus of daylong audio recordings longitudinally collected with the LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) system from infants aged 3 to 24 months. We conduct a thorough exploration of this data set, which serves as a quality check for both the data and the analysis tools. We evaluate the reliability of LENA metrics by systematically comparing them with those obtained from the ChildProject set of tools and by checking the known dynamics of the metrics with age. These metrics are also used to replicate, on our data set, findings from (Warlaumont et al, 2014) about the increase of infants' speech vocalizations and temporal contingencies between infants and caregivers with age

workshop paper

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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VerbCLIP: Improving Verb Understanding in Vision-Language Models

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How can large language models become more human?

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The Emergence of High-Level Semantics in a Signaling Game

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Evaluating Grammatical Well-Formedness in Large Language Models: A Comparative Study with Human Judgments

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This study investigates the performance of SigLIP, a state-of-the-art Vision-Language Model (VLM), in predicting labels for images depicting 1,278 concepts. Our analysis across 300 images per concept shows that the model frequently predicts the exact user-tagged labels, but similarly, it often predicts labels that are semantically related to the exact labels in various ways: synonyms, hypernyms, co-hyponyms, and associated words, particularly for abstract concepts. We then zoom into the diversity of the user tags of images and word associations for abstract versus concrete concepts. Surprisingly, not only abstract but also concrete concepts exhibit significant variability, thus challenging the traditional view that representations of concrete concepts are less diverse.

Evaluating Semantic Relations in Predicting Textual Labels for Images of Abstract and Concrete Concepts

Diachronic corpus analyses reveal that syntactic usage patterns change over time. Are these changes reflected in differences in language processing across the human lifespan? We use the attachment of with-prepositional phrases (PPs) as a case study for investigating this question: a with-PP can attach to a verb, describing an instrument with which to perform the action (e.g., Slice the cake [with a knife]), or to a direct object (DO), modifying the noun (e.g., Slice the cake [with the pink frosting]). The relative frequencies of the instrument and modifier constructions differ depending on the verb in the sentence --- the `verb bias''. Using two diachronic corpora, Syntgram and CCOHA, we analyzed the co-occurrence statistics of 27 verbs and instrument vs. modifier with-PPs. Between the 1940s and the 2000s, some verbs were more instrument-biased (i.e., more likely to co-occur with with-PPs that attach to the verb than the DO) than others and co-occurrence patterns were more similar for temporally close decades, suggesting subtle diachronic changes in usage patterns. We collected sentence interpretation data probing with-PP attachment preferences in participants ranging in age from 25 to 75. Interpretations of globally ambiguous sentences (e.g., Pet the rabbit with the towel) differed depending on the verb (i.e., some verbs elicit more instrument than modifier interpretations of the PP than others and vice versa) and on the age of the participant. In particular, verbs which became less instrument-biased over time elicited more instrument interpretations among older adults than young adults, suggesting that variation in language comprehension can be in part predicted from the corpus statistics of the time periods that an individual experienced.

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Daily auditory environments in French-speaking infants: A longitudinal dataset

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