Related papers: Evaluating computational models of infant phonetic…
The way infants use auditory cues to learn to speak despite the acoustic mismatch of their vocal apparatus is a hot topic of scientific debate. The simulation of early vocal learning using articulatory speech synthesis offers a way towards…
One of the many tasks facing the typically-developing child language learner is learning to discriminate between the distinctive sounds that make up words in their native language. Here we investigate whether multimodal…
Decades of research has studied how language learning infants learn to discriminate speech sounds, segment words, and associate words with their meanings. While gradual development of such capabilities is unquestionable, the exact nature of…
Self-supervised techniques for learning speech representations have been shown to develop linguistic competence from exposure to speech without the need for human labels. In order to fully realize the potential of these approaches and…
Predicting the words that a child is going to learn next can be useful for boosting language acquisition, and such predictions have been shown to be possible with both neural network techniques (looking at changes in the vocabulary state…
How do adults understand children's speech? Children's productions over the course of language development often bear little resemblance to typical adult pronunciations, yet caregivers nonetheless reliably recover meaning from them. Here,…
Infants, adults, non-human primates and non-primates all learn patterns implicitly, and they do so across modalities. The biological evidence supports the hypothesis that the mechanism for this learning is general but computationally local.…
Visual world studies show that upon hearing a word in a target-absent visual context containing related and unrelated items, toddlers and adults briefly direct their gaze towards phonologically related items, before shifting towards…
Our native language influences the way we perceive speech sounds, affecting our ability to discriminate non-native sounds. We compare two ideas about the influence of the native language on speech perception: the Perceptual Assimilation…
Decoding speech from brain activity is a long-awaited goal in both healthcare and neuroscience. Invasive devices have recently led to major milestones in that regard: deep learning algorithms trained on intracranial recordings now start to…
A few million words suffice for children to acquire language. Yet, the brain mechanisms underlying this unique ability remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we investigate neural activity recorded from over 7,400 electrodes…
Neural network-based systems can now learn to locate the referents of words and phrases in images, answer questions about visual scenes, and execute symbolic instructions as first-person actors in partially-observable worlds. To achieve…
Figuring out which objects or concepts words refer to is a central language learning challenge for young children. Most models of this process posit that children learn early object labels from co-occurrences of words and their referents…
Purpose: This study evaluated whether articulatory kinematics, inferred by Articulatory Phonology speech inversion neural networks, aligned with perceptual ratings of /r/ and /s/ in the speech of children with speech sound disorders.…
Typically, children start to learn their first words between 6 and 9 months, linking spoken utterances to their visual referents. Without prior knowledge, a word encountered for the first time can be interpreted in countless ways; it might…
Recent experiments reveal that 6- to 12-month-old infants can learn probabilities and reason with them. In this work, we present a novel computational system called Neural Probability Learner and Sampler (NPLS) that learns and reasons with…
During the first years of life, infant vocalizations change considerably, as infants develop the vocalization skills that enable them to produce speech sounds. Characterizations based on specific acoustic features, protophone categories, or…
Language models provide a key framework for studying linguistic theories based on prediction, but phonological analysis using large language models (LLMs) is difficult; there are few phonological benchmarks beyond English and the standard…
Sex classification of children's voices allows for an investigation of the development of secondary sex characteristics which has been a key interest in the field of speech analysis. This research investigated a broad range of acoustic…
Neural network models using predictive coding are interesting from the viewpoint of computational modelling of human language acquisition, where the objective is to understand how linguistic units could be learned from speech without any…