Markers of Topical Discourse in Child-Directed Speech

Hannah Rohde, Michael C. Frank
2014 Cognitive Science  
Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provides new opportunities for listeners to infer speaker meaning. Such inferences allow the listener to
more » ... d up a representation of the speakers' intended topic and more generally to identify relationships, structures, and messages that extend across multiple utterances. We address this issue by analyzing a video corpus of child-caregiver interactions. We use topic continuity as an index of discourse structure, examining how caregivers introduce and discuss objects across utterances. For the analysis, utterances are grouped into topical discourse sequences using three annotation strategies: raw annotations of speakers' referents, the output of a model that groups utterances based on those annotations, and the judgments of human coders. We analyze how the lexical, syntactic, and social properties of caregiver-child interaction change over the course of a sequence of topically-related utterances. Our findings suggest that many cues used to signal topicality in adult discourse are also available in child-directed speech. Discourse in child-directed speech 3
doi:10.1111/cogs.12121 pmid:24731080 fatcat:3dkh5ssvjrcclosehvk3auglse