# Learning to Understand Child-directed and Adult-directed Speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.02721 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02721/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [How to Plant Trees in Language Models: Data and Architectural Effects on the Emergence of Syntactic Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19905/) (2023)
- [SLABERT Talk Pretty One Day: Modeling Second Language Acquisition with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19589/) (2023)
- [Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23689/) (2025)
- [How Familiar Does That Sound? Cross-Lingual Representational Similarity Analysis of Acoustic Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10179/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech directed to children differs from adult-directed speech in linguistic aspects such as repetition, word choice, and sentence length, as well as in aspects of the speech signal itself, such as prosodic and phonemic variation. Human language acquisition research indicates that child-directed speech helps language learners. This study explores the effect of child-directed speech when learning to extract semantic information from speech directly. We compare the task performance of models trained on adult-directed speech (ADS) and child-directed speech (CDS). We find indications that CDS helps in the initial stages of learning, but eventually, models trained on ADS reach comparable task performance, and generalize better. The results suggest that this is at least partially due to linguistic rather than acoustic properties of the two registers, as we see the same pattern when looking at models trained on acoustically comparable synthetic speech.