Search

Background. The focus is on the potential of Russian scientific school for shaping the linguistic worldview of students in Russian schools when teaching the Russian language. This scientific school was created by Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences Mikhail Trofimovich Baranov. At the moment, the academic subject Russian language is considered from the ideological positions of socialization and personal identity, determining value priorities in the knowledge of Russian culture. The educational role of the Russian language as a meta-subject in personal development is being strengthened. Objectives. The research aims at evaluating progressive ideas and trends in the methods of teaching the Russian language. Their importance in obtaining quality results in the educational process as well as positive connections between the scientific achievements of methodological scientists and the possibilities of their application in the present time are identified. Methods. The study was carried out on the basis of a review of the works of the leader of the scientific school M.T. Baranov and analytical materials devoted to this scientist at different periods of time. A and analysis were carried out, assessing His contribution to Russian science is assessed in the analysis of selected publications of 2024. Results. The personal contribution of the scientist, whose ideas are continuously enriched by his successors, is of great importance. The objectivity of the assessment is based on the basic principles of the scientific school of M.T. Baranov and the prolonged and multidimensional nature of research in the development of the teacher’s ideas in science. Conclusions. The study has shown the potential of the scientist’s methodological heritage in a number of relevant issues: systematic study of the Russian language in secondary school, active attention to children’s speech, its enrichment and content, theoretical understanding of spelling methods, reliance on the traditions of cognitive-aesthetic teaching of the Russian language and speech.

In this paper, we present our effort to develop an automatic speaker verification (ASV) system for low resources children's data. For the children's speakers, very limited amount of speech data is available in majority of the languages for training the ASV system. Developing an ASV system under low resource conditions is a very challenging problem. To develop the robust baseline system, we merged out of domain adults' data with children's data to train the ASV system and tested with children's speech. This kind of system leads to acoustic mismatches between training and testing data. To overcome this issue, we have proposed spectral warping based data augmentation. We modified adult speech data using spectral warping method (to simulate like children's speech) and added it to the training data to overcome data scarcity and mismatch between adults' and children's speech. The proposed data augmentation gives 20.46% and 52.52% relative improvement (in equal error rate) for Indian Punjabi and British English speech databases, respectively. We compared our proposed method with well known data augmentation methods: SpecAugment, speed perturbation (SP) and vocal tract length perturbation (VTLP), and found that the proposed method performed best. The proposed spectral warping method is publicly available at https://github.com/kathania/Speaker-Verification-spectral-warping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the research was to study the peculiarities of the reflection of emotional states "neutral (calm state)–sadness–joy–anger–fear" in the speech and facial expressions of 7–8 years old children and to identify differences in the expression of emotions by boys and girls of this age. The work was carried out as part of the study of the emotional sphere of children with typical and atypical development using the CEDM method for assessing the emotional development of children. 14 children (7 boys, 7 girls)—primary school students—took part in the study. The ability of children to express emotions in the characteristics of voice and facial expressions and to recognize emotions was analyzed. For this purpose, speech recording and video recording of children's facial expressions and behavior, instrumental and perceptual analysis of emotional speech, and automatic analysis of facial expression were carried out. The children's heart rate was recorded, and the leading hemisphere by speech was determined using a dichotic listening. The features of the reflection of the emotional states of boys and girls in the characteristics of speech are revealed. The specificity of reflecting the emotional states of children in facial expression is described. The connections between the psychophysiological indicators of children and their reflection of emotional states in their voice and facial expressions were determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study is to analyze the morphological features of the Russian speech of two generations of Russian-German bilinguals living in Germany and Russian monolinguals living in Russia. The relevance of this study is due to the need to study the state of the Russian language abroad, its preservation and development. Four groups of informants took part in the study: 22 bilingual adults, 26 their children, 19 monolingual adults, 23 their children. The age of the parents is 35-50 years, the age of the children is 10-15 years. The material of the study was transcripts of audio recordings of oral stories based on pictures from the book by M. Mayer “Frog: where are you?”. Research methods are directed sampling, descriptive, systematization, statistical and comparative. Deviations from morphological norms were grouped into two structural types: 1) deviations from the norms of constructing word forms; 2) deviations from the norms of the choice of word forms. The study determined the average number of deviations from morphological norms in the stories of four groups of informants. It was found that in families seeking to preserve the Russian language in conditions of emigration, the morphological system remains relatively stable. At the same time, the average proportion of deviations from morphological norms in the speech of bilinguals is higher than in the speech of monolinguals, and in the speech of children is higher than in the speech of their parents. The average values of the number of typical deviations from the norms in each of the groups were determined. The heterogeneity of the number of deviations from the norms in individual representatives of each of the groups of informants was revealed. It is established that in some families the literary language is preserved, and the influence of the German language is not revealed, in others the vernacular is the means of communication, and some deviations from morphological norms may be caused by interlanguage interference. It should be noted that the greatest difficulty for all native speakers of the Russian language is the norms of the use of case forms and prepositional-case.

Copyright of Acta Onomastica is the property of Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Czech Language Institute and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article analyzes the modern speech of children aged from 2-3 to 14 years and examines how other languages and cultures infl uence it. The research material comprises handwritten and transcribed audio and video recordings of children’s colloquial speech, correspondence of children in the Viber messenger. The material was collected during 2016–2022, its total volume amounts to about 22,000 instances of word usage. The methods used are those of included observation and discursive analysis. The vocabulary of children aged 2-3 to 14 years was shown to be actively supplied with lexical units sourced from the English language and Internet slang. The analysis of oral and written genres (post, stories, battle, live broadcast) created by children within the popular social networks TikTok, Likee, Instagram (2017) allowed us to establish that children typically copy speech patterns and behaviors of popular bloggers. A study of children’s voice and written messages in smartphone messengers Viber, Telegram (2022) revealed the formation of a specifi c vocabulary in children’s speech, including not only Anglicisms and school jargon, but also a telltale sign of Internet communication – the reduction of words to one syllable. Written messages are organized in a specifi c manner, consisting of statements, each of which is presented as a separate post. Various surveys and diff erent types of tasks based on the “reply and send to a friend” pattern are common. Using virtual reality, children strive for self-realization: they sing, act out dialogues with toys, conduct “scientifi c research”, but in the process they use less than perfect, most often foreign, role models. The authors conclude that not only the English language content of the Internet, but also the speech behavior, ideals and values advertised by popular, primarily Western, leaders of the blogosphere, have a signifi cant impact on modern children’s speech.

The objectives of this investigation are (1) to compare and correlate speech and spelling data from children with phonological disorders and (2) to compare their speech and spelling mistakes in relation to the phonological classes and to the subtype of phonological disorder. Ten children were assessed with two subtypes of phonological disorder: phonological delay and consistent phonological disorder (five in each group). Assessments - (i) of phoneticphonological speech aspects and (ii) of spelling performances in the stops, fricatives, nasals and liquids consonantal classes - were conducted. In speech, the phonetic inventory, the phonological system and the calculus of the Percentage of Consonants Correct - Revised were assessed. In spelling, the mistakes were characterized by the Percentage of Correct Consonantal Graphemes. Indexes of speech and spelling accuracies were compared and correlated. As results: speech presented a higher percentage of correct answers than spelling; speaking and spelling were not correlated; mistakes varied in relation to the phonological classes in both speaking and spelling; the classes which posed a statistic difference were the fricatives and the liquids ones; both subtypes of phonological disorder did not present any different result. Since the phonological disorders were not correlated, direct relationships between speech and spelling mistakes were not identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL) is a rapidly developing area accelerated by advancements in the field of AI. A well-designed and reliable CALL system allows students to practice language skills, like pronunciation, any time outside of the classroom. Furthermore, gamification via mobile applications has shown encouraging results on learning outcomes and motivates young users to practice more and perceive language learning as a positive experience. In this work, we adapt the latest speech recognition technology to be a part of an online pronunciation training system for small children. As part of our gamified mobile application, our models will assess the pronunciation quality of young Swedish children diagnosed with Speech Sound Disorder, and participating in speech therapy. Additionally, the models provide feedback to young non-native children learning to pronounce Swedish and Finnish words. Our experiments revealed that these new models fit into an online game as they function as speech recognizers and pronunciation evaluators simultaneously. To make our systems more trustworthy and explainable, we investigated whether the combination of modern input attribution algorithms and time-aligned transcripts can explain the decisions made by the models, give us insights into how the models work and provide a tool to develop more reliable solutions.

Since its inception, conversation analysis has focused on the question of how participants achieve a fast and smooth alignment between two turns. Most research has analyzed adults’ conversations, but much less has been known about child-adult interactions. The aim of this study is to analyze the temporal patterns of children’s utterances and turn-taking (TT). Twenty adult-child conversations (ages 5 and 7) were selected from the GABI database. Articulation rate, duration of interpausal units, pauses, and FTO-value (Floor Transfer Offset) of turn-taking launched by the children were analyzed. Temporal patterns did not differ between the two age groups, but individual differences were found within both groups. TT mostly occurred with a gap, but children were also able to take the floor immediately. TTs after a gap were significantly longer than after overlapping speech. The results provide new information on the communicative competence in childhood, particularly regarding timing patterns and organization of child-adult dialogues.

Copyright of Applied Linguistics / Taikomoji Kalbotyra is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper describes the language acquisition and verb-forming processes related to the issue of argument marking for native-speaker Georgian children from 24 to 42 months of age, who were born and raised in Georgia. Because of the complexity of the Georgian verbal system, it is a challenge to study the acquisition process in this language. We attempted to observe how native-speaker children overcome this complexity during the acquisition process. The study is based on samples of four Georgian-speaking children from the developing corpus of Georgian-speaking children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examined the link between Korean-speaking children's vowel production and its perception by inexperienced adults and also observed whether ongoing vowel changes in mid-back vowels affect adults' perceptions when the vowels are produced by children. This study analyzed vowels in monosyllabic words produced by 20 children, ranging from 2 to 6 years old, with a focus on gender distinction, and used them as perceptual stimuli for word perception by 20 inexperienced adult listeners. Acoustic analyses indicated that F0 was not a reliable cue for distinguishing gender, but the first two formants served as reliable cues for gender distinction. The results confirmed that the spacing of the two low formants is linguistically and para-linguistically important in identifying vowel types and gender. However, a pair of non-low back vowels caused difficulties in correct vowel identification. Proximal distance between the vowels could be interpreted to result in the highest mismatch between children's production and adults' perception of the two non-low back vowels in the Korean language. We attribute the source of the highest mismatch of the two non-low back vowels to the ongoing sound change observed in high and mid-back vowels in adult speech. The ongoing vowel change is also observed in the children's vowel space, which may well be shaped after the caregivers whose non-low back vowels are close to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the possibilities of creating a corpus of children’s speech and the use of corpus research in ontolinguistics. The corpus of texts is defined by the author as a tool for quantitative linguistic research, which presupposes a stepwise solution of a number of problems: 1. Selection of the material that most fully and rationally represents the linguistic phenomenon. 2. Estimation of the required volume of texts. 3. Creation of a system of markup – a tool that distinguishes the corpus from a collection of texts, diaries and dictionaries. 4. Post-processing and creation of the corpus in electronic form. The expansion of corpus research leads to the emergence of children’s speech corpora: CHILDES, INFANT.RU, CHILD.RU, Emo.Child.Ru, StartWrit. The article demonstrates the difficulties of compiling corpora of children’s speech associated with its dynamism, variability, individuality of children’s speech strategies, and abundance of neologisms. An electronic corpus of children’s speech with grammatical markup was compiled on the basis of the publication “Corpus of Children’s Utterances” by V. K. Kharchenko. The corpus was created using the AntConcprogram and the MyStem morphological markup program. The creation of the corpus included the following stages: 1. Transfer of the material into electronic format. 2. Data processing. 3. Automatic grammatical markup. 4. Post-processing. 5. Presentation of the material in the form convenient for further study. The project of a grammatical corpus of children’s speech presented in this study is considered as a tool for modeling the process of acquisition and use of the basic, initial grammatical categories. Some grammatical patterns, singled out with the help of the corpus, can make it possible to create tools for studying the grammatical component of the child’s linguistic competencies, and specifically for revealing the real everyday grammar of the child’s linguistic personality. The real everyday grammar itself – a set of grammatical forms on the basis of which the speaker constructs their speech – can become a stepping stone for creating new methods of teaching Russian grammar, especially when teaching Russian as a second language.

This article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of linguistic creativity in the speech of a child of senior preschool and primary school age based on German language material. The relevance of this study is due to the increased attention of linguists to the study of various aspects of the formation of a linguistic personality, including the study of children’s speech. The purpose of the article is to analyze the means of actualization of linguistic creativity in the child’s discourse, which consists in the specific use of means of various language levels. The research material was speech examples obtained as a result of questionnaires and interviews of native speakers, as well as materials from the children’s spontaneous speech corpus of the Dortmund Research Center. It is revealed that the category of linguistic creativity is reflected at various levels of the language system within the framework of children’s discourse and is the leading characteristic of the speech of a child of senior preschool and primary school age. At the phonetic level, the phenomenon of linguistic creativity is verbalized through the creative use of interjections, syllabic recitative, chanting of syllables. It is revealed that at the lexical level, linguistic creativity is reflected in the non-standard use of various word-formation capabilities of the language. A special function is performed by the reception of the language game, both at the lexical level and at the text level. The category of linguistic creativity is closely related to the process of socialization and serves as a means of expressing a child’s self-presentation in the world of adults and peers. Further analysis of the empirical material makes it possible to identify a number of other techniques of various language levels at which the phenomenon of linguistic creativity is actualized, as well as to analyze the linguistic and cultural specifics of children’s speech creation in comparison with other languages.

The theme of the article is a research into the issue of translation of children’s speech. The analysis will be conducted based on three excerpts from a novel – Portofino – written by a contemporary American writer Frank Schaeffer and translated into Polish by the author of the article, early in her career as a translator. First, the results of text typology investigation by Anna Trosborg (1997b), Paul Kussmaul (1995, 1997) and Christiane Nord (2018) regarding cognitive structuring, text structures, and general style conventions will be highlighted. Then the outcomes of the translation process research (TPR) on cohesive aspects and structuring by Michael Carl, Srinivas Bangalore & Moritz Schaeffer (2016) will be summarised. This will be followed by the discussion of findings of Paul Thompson & Alison Sealey (2007), Gillian Lathey (2011), and Anna Čermáková (2018) regarding the issue of repetition and the aspects of point of view. Subsequently, the notion of style in a work of fiction will be introduced and followed by the description of stylistic and linguistic means used to achieve it. This will include the discussion of speech and thought presentation (STP) scales proposed first by Geoffrey Leech & Mick Short (2007) and then developed by Mick Short in cooperation with Elena Semino (2004). Next, the stylistic features of children’s speech and its linguistic exponents will be outlined. The translation analysis will focus on stylistic and linguistic devices used by the author to imitate children’s speech in the source text and their rendering by the translator in the target text. The achieved effect and translation equivalence will be evaluated, possible reasons behind any loss in meaning will become identified and some final recommendations for translators will get defined.

According to several studies, children’s speech is more dynamic and inconsistent compared to an adult’s speech. This aspect can be considered in the task of recognizing the age of the person who speaks and of great importance in many applications, such as humancomputer interaction, security on Internet and education assistants. Those applications have a dependency on language and accent, due to the different sounds and styles that characterize the speakers. This paper presents the initial results on the identification of Costa Rican children’s speech, in a database created for this purpose, consisting of words pronounced by adults and children of several ages. For this first study we chose the most common vowel of the language, and extract a set of common acoustic features to determine its applicability in distinguishing between adults and children of an age range. The outcome results shows promising results in the classification using a single vowel, that improves according to the number of vowels used to extract the acoustic features. This means that an automatic system could be able to improve its capacity to identify age as more speech information is received and transcribed, but cannot be very accurate in short interactions.

Speaker diarization is the task of automatically identifying speaker identities and detecting their speaking times in an audio recording. Several algorithms have shown improvements in the performance of this task during the past years. However, it still has performance challenges in interaction scenarios, such as between a child and adult, where interruptions, fillers, laughs and other elements may affect the detection and clustering of the segments. In this work, we perform an exploratory study with two diarization algorithms in children-adult interactions within a recording studio and assess the effectiveness of the algorithms in different age groups and genders. All participants are native Costa Rican Spanish speakers. The children have ages between 3 to 14 years, and the interaction combines guided repetition of words or short phrases, as well as natural speech. The results demonstrate how the age affects the diarization performance, both in cluster purity and speaker purity, in a direct but non-linear fashion.

The human voice can convey subtle nuances of mood and condition which are captured by the auditory system and recognized on the basis of personal experience, the listener's state, and the motivation of the speaker. Voice and speech impairments in children ad their different severities in different disorders allow us to formulate the question of what information can be extracted by adults listening to the speech of a child with atypical development. The aim of the present work was to assess the ability of adults to recognize information about children from their speech. The study used auditory perception experiments. A total of 685 listeners took part in the study, which used 40 test sequences including the speech of 260 children aged 4–16 years, developing typically and with atypical development in the form of autistic spectrum disorder, Down's syndrome, and intellectual disabilities. On listening to samples of children's speech, listeners were found to be able to recognize the children's sex and their psychoneurological status correctly, but had difficulty determining the children's emotional status and the lexical meaning of speech; age was poorly recognized, especially in children with atypical development. Correlations were found between adults' ability to recognize sex, age, psychoneurological and emotional status correctly on the one hand and the organization of test sequences and listeners' professional experience on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anthropocentric focus of contemporary linguistic research highlights the specificity of individual linguistic worldview which includes a personal sense of toponymy. The studies discussing the ways that toponymic concepts are apprehended, memorized, and retrieved from memory are usually based on experimental data. But looking at irregular changes that toponyms may receive in individual speech is no less informative. Children’s speech proves the most valuable source for this, since it is less bound to the language norms of everyday communication, which makes the modifications more distinct. The author uses a collection (more than 170 items) of St.-Petersburg toponym modifications from children of 3–11 years old, drawing some conclusions about the peculiarities of their auditory perception (the role of individual frequency, phonemic and supra-phonemic word features in building semantic awareness, the specificity of phoneme patterns recognition by children and the processes of etymologizing and rethinking the internal form of the word), memorizing and storing information (the study of the child’s vocabulary connections and semantization of words including proper and common nouns; making up words and grammatical forms in the course of their multiple reproduction). Analysis of this real-life data brings clarity over some structural and functional aspects of individual linguistic systems and their speech manifestations. The information obtained can be used for creating child’s speech, memory, and attention training programs, as well as for studies in local history.

Conventionally, the extraction of hand-crafted acoustic features has been separated from the task of establishing robust machine-learning models in speech processing. The manual approach of feature engineering is both time-consuming and necessitates specialist knowledge, posing significant hindrances. Moreover, the resulting features may not be ideal for the desired application. The speech community has adopted raw waveform modeling to enhance performance. These techniques learn an optimized representation of the input automatically. With deep learning (DL) advancements, raw waveform modeling has become valuable for tasks like classification and prediction. The primary aim of this survey is to offer valuable insights and fills a gap in the existing literature by providing a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in speech and speaker recognition using raw waveform modeling for both adult and children's speech. The article covers papers from 2013–2023 and is the first to review both adult and children's databases. The article focuses on the advantages of raw waveform models. It presents essential concepts and techniques while discussing the challenges and limitations of using raw waveforms for speech and speaker recognition in both adult and children's speech. The article also evaluates recent progress in DL architectures such as SincNet, ResNet, and RawNet, and outlines future research directions in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with insertions viewed as a sub-type of intrasententional code switches within utterances of a child who simultaneously acquires Russian and English in a Russian family in Russia. Longitudinal studies of bilingual children’s speech activities are among the topical research phenomena since they can provide insight into the essential characteristics of early childhood bilingualism development. The bilingualism under observation is developed according to the principle “one person – one language” in a Russian monoethnic family, with mother speaking her native language and father speaking English, his non-native language, with their child. The authors’aim is to find out structural characteristics of insertions and their use in mixed utterances of the child during five years of his bilingual development (at the age period between three and eight years old). The data are oral utterances of the child that have been obtained with the help of participant observation fixed by videotaping and written notes. Structural analysis of insertions is based on the theoretical assumptions of the Matrix Frame Model elaborated by an American linguist C. Myers-Scotton. Two opposite trends act in the observed case: on the one hand, English language competence of the child is increasing; on the other hand, Russian as a dominant language has been more and more actively used as the Matrix language in mixed utterances, which subdues English insertions and limits their morphosyntactic significance. The results of the research show how different kinds of insertions reveal the dynamics of childhood bilingualism developed within a family or in a kindergarten.

This paper describes the language acquisition and verb-forming processes related to the issue of argument marking for native-speaker Georgian children from 24 to 42 months of age, who were born and raised in Georgia. Because of the complexity of the Georgian verbal system, it is a challenge to study the acquisition process in this language. We attempted to observe how native-speaker children overcome this complexity during the acquisition process. The study is based on samples of four Georgian-speaking children from the developing corpus of Georgian-speaking children.

The study examined the link between Korean-speaking children’s vowel production and its perception by inexperienced adults and also observed whether ongoing vowel changes in mid-back vowels affect adults’ perceptions when the vowels are produced by children. This study analyzed vowels in monosyllabic words produced by 20 children, ranging from 2 to 6 years old, with a focus on gender distinction, and used them as perceptual stimuli for word perception by 20 inexperienced adult listeners. Acoustic analyses indicated that F0 was not a reliable cue for distinguishing gender, but the first two formants served as reliable cues for gender distinction. The results confirmed that the spacing of the two low formants is linguistically and para-linguistically important in identifying vowel types and gender. However, a pair of non-low back vowels caused difficulties in correct vowel identification. Proximal distance between the vowels could be interpreted to result in the highest mismatch between children’s production and adults’ perception of the two non-low back vowels in the Korean language. We attribute the source of the highest mismatch of the two non-low back vowels to the ongoing sound change observed in high and mid-back vowels in adult speech. The ongoing vowel change is also observed in the children’s vowel space, which may well be shaped after the caregivers whose non-low back vowels are close to each other.

Copyright of Apuntes Universitarios: Revista de Investigación is the property of Universidad Peruana Union Filiar Tarapoto and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article studies the acoustic production of Central Calatan rhotics in a group of 90 boys and girls aged 5 to 7 years, in medial and final coda. An acoustic description is given by analyzing the number and type of components, both of the closure and opening phases. In view of the combination of different types of components, up to 78 different types of rhotics have been detected. The results show that most rhotic sounds have one or two components, and that rhotics with five or more components are almost always at the end of a word. In terms of acoustic properties, there is variability, with more presence of vocalic components in the medial coda and more fricative or occlusive components in the final coda.

Spotting of keywords in continuous speech signal with the aid of the computer is called a keyword spotting (KWS) system. A variety of strategies have been suggested in the literature to detect keywords from the adult's speech effectively. However, only a limited number of studies have been reported for KWS in children's speech. Due to the difference in physiological properties, the pitch and speaking rate of children's differ from the adult's. Consequently, KWS system model parameters trained on the speech data from adult's signal yield poor performance for children speech. In this paper, we have developed a KWS system for spotting keywords from children's speech using models trained on adults' speech. The proposed approach uses spectral moment time–frequency distribution augmented by low-order cepstral (SMAC) as the front-end feature. The mismatches due to differences in pitch and speaking rate of children and adult speakers are further mitigated by data-augmented training using explicit pitch and speaking rate modifications. The experimental findings presented in this paper show that the SMAC feature offers significantly better output for both clean and noisy test conditions than the conventional Mel frequency cepstral coefficients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article characterizes the formation peculiarities of a child’s language consciousness in preschool ontogeny. This period is the main one for the development of language creativity. The article develops the idea of F. Buslaev about the role of the communicative and nominative competences in mastering the “objective” (extralinguistic reality) and “verbal” (language conceptualization of the world) language codes. In the given key, the researcher analyzes the mechanisms of linguo-creative thinking, which manifests itself in children's reflection on the form and content of linguistic signs at the stage of self-mastering the language. Factors that motivate children for creativity are: the desire to compress the meaning in a single word; to follow the “law” of language symmetry; to fill in the nominative gaps; to clarify the motivation of words and phrases. Particular attention is paid to the ability of children to understand and simulate the game code (during the assimilation of the usual metaphorical analogy in the genre of the brainteaser). The analysis is in complete agreement with the statement of F. Buslaev about the prohibition of formal language training, which destroys the “original” sense of the language in a child. As a promising field, the article postulates the need for introduction of special verbal creativity trainings in the learning process.

The paper presents the results of the analysis of the usage of futures in the speech of the Vranje's children of preschool and primary school age. In this regard, all forms of futures are used by the examinees, and then by calculating the frequency index (IF) the frequency of usage of the dialectic futures structure and the dependence of the usage of this structure on non-linguistic factors - the age of pupils, sex, education of both parents, places of residence, attending kindergarten / school. The sample covered 40 examinees, children of pre-school and primary school age, different sex, parents education and place of residence. The obtained results indicate the use of three different constructions in the service of Futures I, whereby the dialectic futuric structure is the most frequent and resistant to the influence of the language standard. So, the influence of non-linguistic factors on the usage of the dialectic Futuric form is visible, but not great. As a result, age and gender have no influence. The obtained results can contribute to the improvement of the processing of futures in the teaching of the Serbian language, which is particular importance for teaching in the pronounced dialectical area such as the Prizren-South Moravian region, to which the Vranje's speech belongs to.

The investigation reported on this paper was oriented by the following objective: to verify to what extent the hesitations would signal to different forms of negotiation between the subject who enunciates and the others that are shown as present (even though taken as "exterior") in the enunciation. The data was extracted from samples of 5 to 6 year-old children's speech, collected in school context. The analyses has shown that the hesitations refer to actions of facts from the discourse production conditions -- such as the representation (i) of the roles played by the interlocutors, (ii) of the concrete situation of discourse production itself, (iii) of the discoursive objects, as well as (iv) the injunction of speaking. They also refer to the different ways by which the complexities of language (in phonological, grammatical, semantic terms) are shown as problematic to the enunciator subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the data collected during interviews recorded with Polish-French and Polish-English-speaking bilingual children living in Poland, aged from 4 to 8. The task given to the participants was to describe spatial situations in a series of images by answering the researcher's question where is X? The answers were supposed to follow the BLC (Basic Locative Construction) pattern. The given locative constructions were then transcribed in CHAT format and analyzed in order to find out what the children's repertoire of locative prepositions in both language groups is, if the prepositions follow the order of acquisition for both French and English and if any discrepancies in the use of prepositions might result from interlingual transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of the article is the specificity of metalinguistic reflection in children's speech. The article analyzes the linguocreativе nature of children's questions, particularly broadcasting the image of the world of the child and the nature of the processing of linguistic information in the light of cognitions formed. Metalinguistic reflection is characterized as one of the naturally evolving strategies of language acquisition in ontogeny, showing the analytical instinct and cognitive activity of the child. The purpose of the research is to identify unique children's innovations related to the reflection of their form and content, in terms of the associative and functional content. The main method is discourse analysis of metalinguistic statements recorded in the spontaneous speech of children in the form of a question. Particular emphasis is laid upon the interdependence of compensatory and deliberate creativity of the child, exhibiting the ability to make a conscious violation of the language of the canon. Metalinguistic component of children's issues provides an opportunity to assess the child's creativity, speech acts in terms of fluency, flexibility, originality. Children's questions are classified into those regarding the logic of things and the logic of language nomination, their correlation is established. This analysis reveals the following features of metalinguistic reflection in the formation of the language person: 1) development of linguistic abilities in "reading" motivational word forms and application of derived algorithms in creative word activity; 2) the expression of a child's uniqueness in the perception of aspects of the world and the language of processed information; 3) modeling function in the formation of dynamic subsystems child's speech, allowing the child to realize their nominative and communicative needs.

The paper aims to discuss the expression and development of politeness speech acts, i.e. greeting, saying goodbye, thanking, usage of the word please, apology, congratulation and wishes, in the speech of a Lithuanian boy, aged 1;6–2;7, and a girl, aged 1;8–2;8. The source of data contains two corpora of transcribed conversations of the children mostly interacting with their mothers (about 20 and 27 hours of recordings are transcribed). The corpora are developed by scholars of Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. One of the foci of analysis is to discuss the expression and development of the above-mentioned politeness speech acts and common pragmatic errors regarding the usage of politeness formulas in the children’s speech. Another focus is the investigation of the socialization strategies applied by the parents. Based on the current research by different scholars, the article raises the hypothesis that Lithuanian children in the second or third year of life acquire the majority of politeness speech acts as discussed in this paper. The analysis revealed that at the beginning of the observation children lacked communicative competence to use politeness speech acts in a pragmatically appropriate way. They confused situations when to use politeness formulas of thanking, apology and the word please and lacked the knowledge of how to use politeness adjacency pairs. The study also shows that the repetition of parents’ politeness formulas was common. Furthermore, the appropriate use of spontaneous and pragmatic greeting and saying goodbye was observed first, and only later the usage of thanking and the word please appeared. However, only few examples of other politeness speech acts (i.e. apology, congratulation and wishes) were observed in the corpus. Therefore, further research is necessary. The results demonstrate that at the beginning of the third year the children used most of the politeness speech acts appropriately. An early acquisition was affected by children’s familiarisation with politeness routines taught by their parents. The parents directed and prompted their children to repeat politeness formulas, elicited them by questions or performatives and sometimes taught children to be polite by producing metalinguistic comments. Current research seems to indicate that other Lithuanian children could demonstrate similar developmental patterns of politeness speech acts and make similar pragmatic errors as well as being similarly socialized to use politeness formulas.

The basic task in the studies on children's language acquisition is to establish how successfully or unsuccessfully children have acquired a language according to their age group and development. A group of researchers from Liepāja University in cooperation with Rēzekne Academy of Technologies and the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, are studying language acquisition in the National research programme "Latvian Language". The task is connected with testing children's readiness to learn in the official state language at school. Thus, the study encompasses the testing of the vocabulary, grammar and communication skills in various sociolinguistic situations. The article focuses on some peculiar features of children's language rooted in the Latvian language, and even in the systems of the Baltic languages. As linguists develop tools for testing children's language skills, the identified children's speech peculiarities should be considered (for example, the possibility of ie > ī and o [uo] > ū, the interchange between voiced/voiceless consonants in different positions in a word or a sentence), also causes of peculiarities should be identified in the testing process (considering dialectal influences, and the impact of other languages, or difficulties in articulation). It should be understood that the language system and the norm are not identical because children form their own individual systems as illustrated by the usage of prefixes in verb formation as described in the article. Because children create new words and word forms, they create pairs of antonyms so characteristic for their unique language because every prefix in the Latvian language can express a large variety of meanings. As prefixes change, the meaning of the same corresponding word changes, for example, atlasīt, ielasīt, izlasīt, nelasīt, nolasīt, palasīt, pārlasīt, pielasīt, salasīt, uzlasīt, and even aplasīt. Children have noticed such possibilities and they employ them creatively for one of the most fundamental human functions, namely, to communicate. As children try using the familiar language elements more than they have succeeded in hearing, learning, acquiring from adults' speech, those language elements often result in creations incompatible with those in standard language. Although creative and purposeful, short-term exploitation of language means shows that children have grasped regularity of language units, and thus they are proceeding onto normative usage to be reached in full during the school years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A speech signal contains important paralinguistic information, such as the identity, age, gender, language, accent, and the emotional state of the speaker. Automatic recognition of these types of information in adults’ speech has received considerable attention, however there has been little work on children’s speech. This paper focuses on speaker, gender, and age-group recognition from children’s speech. The performances of several classification methods are compared, including Gaussian Mixture Model–Universal Background Model (GMM–UBM), GMM–Support Vector Machine (GMM–SVM) and i-vector based approaches. For speaker recognition, error rate decreases as age increases, as one might expect. However for gender and age-group recognition the effect of age is more complex due mainly to consequences of the onset of puberty. Finally, the utility of different frequency bands for speaker, age-group and gender recognition from children’s speech is assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the trends of exploration by a child of their own given name seen as an important factor of the development of linguistic capacity in ontogenesis. The author analyzes the perception of the personal name (both in its full and short forms) as determined by the mental dominants of preschoolers’ and school-age children’s linguistic mind and reveals the specificity of the nominative function of the name, its communicative and linguo-cultural features in children’s speech. The author points out the incapacity of a child, at early stages of development, to detach a given name from its concrete bearer, the use of a name as a deictic means of auto-identification, the inseparability of a name from the original scene of communication, the individual character of the emotional and evaluative components of its meaning as well as the tendency to adjust the name to a particular situation and to use the name as a motivated sign. The author focuses on the mechanisms of phonetic identification which contribute to the formation of individual phonosemantic features of the name and the false etymological convergences which clarify the internal form of anthroponyms, including the convergences that have a deliberate characterizing function and manifest children’s liking for onomastic play. The article establishes stable correlations between that kind of transformations of a name and the traditions of children’s folklore. In the linguistic mind of a child any proper name acquires a specific psychological substance and specific functions on each stage of ontogenesis, the transition zone between proper and appellative names being flexible and filling anthroponyms with concrete connotative meanings. The name helps children to become aware of their own uniqueness and to realize the sense of interpersonal relations reflected in names motivations.