How Adults Understand What Young Children Say. (arXiv:2206.07807v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and
yet parents and other caregivers find meaning in that speech and react
accordingly. Here we investigate how these adult inferences as listeners
reflect sophisticated beliefs about what children are trying to communicate, as
well as how children are likely to pronounce words. Using a Bayesian framework
for modeling spoken word recognition, we find that computational models can
replicate adult interpretations of children's speech only when they include
strong, …

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