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Lecture: How to measure the syntactic complexity of infant directed speech?

My object of study is the differences between parental speech addressed to male and female infants. This question is indeed relevant to understanding the development of gender identity in the very first years of life, on one hand; and girls’ advantage observed in language acquisition, on the other hand (Klann-Delius, 2005, pp. 107-109).

This presentation will address specifically the question of syntactic complexity. According to Charles Ferguson, Infant Directed Speech (IDS) is a “simple register” because it has “shorter sentences, fewer subordinated clauses, fewer grammatical relations, and more repetitions than normal adult-to-adult speech” (Ferguson, 2004, p. 179). My aim is to compare the syntactic complexity of the speech addressed to male and to female infants, but the presentation will focus on the step preceding any possible comparison, namely, how can syntactic complexity of spoken speech be measured at all.

My corpus consists of audio recordings from parents (mostly mothers) with their 6- to 10- months-old baby during feeding, playing, or changing diaper. Parental speech is segmented in utterances – defined as any parental flow of speech separated by 300 milliseconds or more from any other parental speech – and transcribed verbatim. The word tokens are tagged for Part of Speech with the STTS 2.0 guidelines (Westpfahl, Schmidt, Jonietz, & Borlinghaus, 2017).

In my talk, I want to present some ideas on how syntactic complexity of utterances can be measured and I am looking forwards to further suggestions from the discussion.

References

Ferguson, C. A. (2004). Talking to Children: A search for Universals. In B. C. Lust & C. Foley (Eds.), First language acquisition: the essential readings (pp. 176-189). Malden, MA [u.a.]: Blackwell. Klann-Delius, G. (2005). Sprache und Geschlecht. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.
Westpfahl, S., Schmidt, T., Jonietz, J., & Borlinghaus, A. (2017). STTS 2.0. Guidelines für die Annotation von POS-Tags für Transkripte gesprochener Sprache in Anlehnung an das Stuttgart Tübingen Tagset (STTS).

Info

Day: 2021-09-24
Start time: 11:10
Duration: 00:40
Room: Don Giovanni

Language: de

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