Related papers: Emergent Jaw Predominance in Vocal Development thr…
In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to…
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…
All previous methods for audio-driven talking head generation assume the input audio to be clean with a neutral tone. As we show empirically, one can easily break these systems by simply adding certain background noise to the utterance or…
In this paper, we introduce a simple and novel framework for one-shot audio-driven talking head generation. Unlike prior works that require additional driving sources for controlled synthesis in a deterministic manner, we instead…
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…
To harness the complexity of their high-dimensional bodies during sensorimotor development, infants are guided by patterns of freezing and freeing of degrees of freedom. For instance, when learning to reach, infants free the degrees of…
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,…
When faced with self-regulation challenges, children have been known the use their language to inhibit their emotions and behaviors. Yet, to date, there has been a critical lack of evidence regarding what patterns in their speech children…
Modelling of early language acquisition aims to understand how infants bootstrap their language skills. The modelling encompasses properties of the input data used for training the models, the cognitive hypotheses and their algorithmic…
Infants acquire language with generalization from minimal experience, whereas large language models require billions of training tokens. What underlies efficient development in humans? We investigated this problem through experiments…
Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of…
Interactions involving children span a wide range of important domains from learning to clinical diagnostic and therapeutic contexts. Automated analyses of such interactions are motivated by the need to seek accurate insights and offer…
A new account of parameter setting during grammatical acquisition is presented in terms of Generalized Categorial Grammar embedded in a default inheritance hierarchy, providing a natural partial ordering on the setting of parameters.…
Vocal responses from caregivers are believed to promote more frequent and more advanced infant vocalizations. However, studies that examine this relationship typically do not account for the fact that infant and adult vocalizations are…
We study the problem of emergent communication, in which language arises because speakers and listeners must communicate information in order to solve tasks. In temporally extended reinforcement learning domains, it has proved hard to learn…
A fundamental challenge in the cognitive sciences is discovering the dynamics that govern behaviour. Take the example of spoken language, which is characterised by a highly variable and complex set of physical movements that map onto the…
Vocal aging, a universal process of human aging, can largely affect one's language use, possibly including some subtle acoustic features of one's utterances like Voice Onset Time. To figure out the time effects, Queen Elizabeth's Christmas…
During voiced speech, the human vocal folds interact with the vocal tract acoustics. The resulting glottal source-resonator coupling has been observed using mathematical and physical models as well as in in vivo phonation. We propose a…
Studying early speech development at scale requires automatic tools, yet automatic phoneme recognition, especially for young children, remains largely unsolved. Building on decades of data collection, we curate TinyVox, a corpus of more…
World models have demonstrated impressive performance on robotic learning tasks. Many such tasks inherently demand multimodal reasoning; for example, filling a bottle with water will lead to visual information alone being ambiguous or…