We are investigating the development of noun phrases in speech and speech+gesture. In particular, we are interested in whether pointing gestures used with “bare nouns” precede and predict the emergence of noun phrases where nouns are preceded by determiners or other parts of speech (adjectives, possessives, etc.). Little is known about the way in which children begin to build complexity around nouns. Our study will allow us to characterize the emergence of verbal complexity surrounding nouns and to investigate the role gesture may play in providing specificity (e.g. this, that, the) to spoken nouns before the same specificity is produced in speech.
The dataset we’re using is based on a subset of transcripts that have had the child utterances annotated for part-of-speech and syntax (by Max). The plan is to add more transcripts to the dataset, but we’re currently using the transcripts of thirteen subjects over the first five sessions (14m to 30m).
Here we’ll describe how we analyzed the dataset described above.
We made a number of requests for lists of lines from the dataset matching various criteria. We’re basically looking at various phrasal categories, dividing up the child utterances into various types. Below are a few of the various phrasal categories we’re considering.
We are defining bare nouns as nouns produced without any type of modifier before them. Bare nouns may occur in either the presence or absence of other speech, but when there is other speech, none of it directly modifies the noun. Bare nouns make up a large proportion of one word utterances, but there are many nouns that may also appear as bare nouns in fluent adult speech. Examples below.
| POSITIVE | NEGATIVE |
|---|---|
| Bear | Brown bear |
| Water | The water |
| I want cookie | I want a cookie |
| I don’t want watermelon | I want more watermelon |
| Train have to go | The purple train have to go |
| There go car | There go that car |