Related papers: Evaluating computational models of infant phonetic…
Learning to understand speech appears almost effortless for typically developing infants, yet from an information-processing perspective, acquiring a language from acoustic speech is an enormous challenge. This chapter reviews recent…
We review computational and robotics models of early language learning and development. We first explain why and how these models are used to understand better how children learn language. We argue that they provide concrete theories of…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
Earlier research has suggested that human infants might use statistical dependencies between speech and non-linguistic multimodal input to bootstrap their language learning before they know how to segment words from running speech. However,…
Infants gradually learn to parse continuous speech into words and connect names with objects, yet the mechanisms behind development of early word perception skills remain unknown. We studied the extent to which early words can be acquired…
Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how these adult inferences as listeners reflect…
Recent studies in speech perception have been closely linked to fields of cognitive psychology, phonology, and phonetics in linguistics. During perceptual attunement, a critical and sensitive developmental trajectory has been examined in…
Understanding how infants perceive speech sounds and language structures is still an open problem. Previous research in artificial neural networks has mainly focused on large dataset-dependent generative models, aiming to replicate…
Human infants have the remarkable ability to learn the associations between object names and visual objects from inherently ambiguous experiences. Researchers in cognitive science and developmental psychology have built formal models that…
Human infants face a formidable challenge in speech acquisition: mapping extremely variable acoustic inputs into appropriate articulatory movements without explicit instruction. We present a computational model that addresses the…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
Theoretical background: early verbal development is not yet fully understood, especially in its formative phase. Research question: can a reliable, easy-to-use coding scheme for the classification of early infant vocalizations be defined…
This study investigates how learners organize perceptual space in early phonetic acquisition by advancing previous studies in two key aspects. Firstly, it examines the shape of the learned hidden representation as well as its ability to…
During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures. However,…
Infant speech perception and learning is modeled using Echo State Network classification and Reinforcement Learning. Ambient speech for the modeled infant learner is created using the speech synthesizer Vocaltractlab. An auditory system is…
Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through…
During their first years of life, infants learn the language(s) of their environment at an amazing speed despite large cross cultural variations in amount and complexity of the available language input. Understanding this simple fact still…
Acoustic analyses of infant vocalizations are valuable for research on speech development as well as applications in sound classification. Previous studies have focused on measures of acoustic features based on theories of speech…
Infants develop complex visual understanding rapidly, even preceding the acquisition of linguistic skills. As computer vision seeks to replicate the human vision system, understanding infant visual development may offer valuable insights.…
During language acquisition, children successively learn to categorize phonemes, identify words, and combine them with syntax to form new meaning. While the development of this behavior is well characterized, we still lack a unifying…