Related papers: Emergence of Language in the Developing Brain
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…
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,…
We investigate how neural language models acquire individual words during training, extracting learning curves and ages of acquisition for over 600 words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., 2007).…
Despite tremendous progress in neuroscience, we do not have a compelling narrative for the precise way whereby the spiking of neurons in our brain results in high-level cognitive phenomena such as planning and language. We introduce a…
The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of…
Network models of language have provided a way of linking cognitive processes to the structure and connectivity of language. However, one shortcoming of current approaches is focusing on only one type of linguistic relationship at a time,…
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 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…
In this work we extend previous analyses of linguistic networks by adopting a multi-layer network framework for modelling the human mental lexicon, i.e. an abstract mental repository where words and concepts are stored together with their…
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…
Understanding how the brain represents the multifaceted properties of words in context is essential for explaining the neural architecture of human language. Here, we combine large-scale psycholinguistic modeling with naturalistic fMRI to…
What insights can machine learning bring to understanding human language acquisition? Large language and multimodal models have achieved remarkable capabilities, but their reliance on massive training datasets creates a fundamental mismatch…
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,…
How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…
The success of neural language models (LMs) on many technological tasks has brought about their potential relevance as scientific theories of language despite some clear differences between LM training and child language acquisition. In…
It takes several years for the developing brain of a baby to fully master word repetition-the task of hearing a word and repeating it aloud. Repeating a new word, such as from a new language, can be a challenging task also for adults.…
Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies show that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop differentiated…
In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. Many accounts of this early phonetic learning exist, but computational models predicting the attunement patterns observed in…
Over the years, many researchers have seemingly made the same observation: Brain and language model activations exhibit some structural similarities, enabling linear partial mappings between features extracted from neural recordings and…