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Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution

Child-directed speech is optimized for syntax-free semantic inference: new paper published by our ISLE-Members

Guanghao You, Balthasar Bickel, Moritz M. Daum and Sabine Stoll have published a new paper on "Child-directed speech is optimized for syntax-free semantic inference"

Child-directed speech is optimized for syntax-free semantic inference

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. You et al. show in their paper that child-directed speech allows for semantic inference without relying on explicit structural information.

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