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SUMMARY:A Computational Model of Infant Speech Development - Dr Ian Howard
 . University of Cambridge\, Department of Engineering
DTSTART:20071106T160000Z
DTEND:20071106T173000Z
UID:TALK8361@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Napoleon Katsos
DESCRIPTION:Almost all theories of child speech development assume that an
  infant learns speech sounds by direct imitation\, performing an acoustic 
 matching of adult output to his own speech. Some theories also postulate a
 n innate link between perception and production. We present a computer mod
 el which has no requirement for acoustic matching on the part of the infan
 t and which treats speech production and perception as separate processes 
 with no innate link. Instead we propose that the infant initially explores
  his speech apparatus and reinforces his own actions on the basis of senso
 ry salience\, developing vocal motor schemes [1]. As the infant’s produc
 tion develops\, he will start to generate utterances which are sufficientl
 y speechlike to provoke a linguistic response from its mother. Such intera
 ctions are particularly important\, because she is better qualified than h
 e is to judge the quality of his speech. Her response to his vocal output 
 is beneficial in a number of ways. Because she is a learned speaker\, her 
 experienced perceptive system can effectively evaluate the infant’s outp
 ut within the phonological system of the ambient language L1. Simply gener
 ating a salient response will tend to encourage the infant’s production 
 of a given utterance. More significantly\, during imitative exchanges in w
 hich the mother reformulates the infant’s speech\, the infant can learn 
 equivalence relations using simple associative mechanisms between his moto
 r activity and his mother’s acoustic output\, and thus can solve the cor
 respondence problem. Notice that the infant does not learn equivalence rel
 ations between his own acoustic output and that of his mother based on aco
 ustic similarity. Any similarity based matching need only needs to be perf
 ormed by his mother. We present the results from preliminary experiments a
 nd demonstrate that this model is able to progress through two distinct st
 ages of speech development. It begins by generating simple sounds and ends
  up producing word-like utterances. 
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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