Related papers: Emergence of Phonemic, Syntactic, and Semantic Rep…
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…
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,…
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.…
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…
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…
Representational spaces learned via language modeling are fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), however there has been limited understanding regarding how and when during training various types of linguistic information emerge…
Neural networks trained on natural language processing tasks capture syntax even though it is not provided as a supervision signal. This indicates that syntactic analysis is essential to the understating of language in artificial…
End-to-end neural network systems for automatic speech recognition (ASR) are trained from acoustic features to text transcriptions. In contrast to modular ASR systems, which contain separately-trained components for acoustic modeling,…
Recent artificial neural networks that process natural language achieve unprecedented performance in tasks requiring sentence-level understanding. As such, they could be interesting models of the integration of linguistic information in the…
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…
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…
Since first introduced, computer simulation has been an increasingly important tool in evolutionary linguistics. Recently, with the development of deep learning techniques, research in grounded language learning has also started to focus on…
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…
This paper is concerned with what intermediate syntactic categories children acquire during first language development, and in what order. Maturational theories make different predictions. Bottom-up accounts (GROWING) propose that lexical…
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…
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,…
The language acquisition literature shows that children do not build their lexicon by segmenting the spoken input into phonemes and then building up words from them, but rather adopt a top-down approach and start by segmenting word-like…
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…
An extensive body of empirical research has revealed remarkable regularities in the acquisition, organization, deployment, and neural representation of human semantic knowledge, thereby raising a fundamental conceptual question: what are…
A longstanding question in cognitive science concerns the learning mechanisms underlying compositionality in human cognition. Humans can infer the structured relationships (e.g., grammatical rules) implicit in their sensory observations…