Modeling the Development of Pronunciation in Infant Speech Acquisition

Ian S. Howard · Piers Messum

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Language Development and Disorders Phonetics and Phonology Research Language and cultural evolution

Abstract

Pronunciation is an important part of speech acquisition, but little attention has been given to the mechanism or mechanisms by which it develops. Speech sound qualities, for example, have just been assumed to develop by simple imitation. In most accounts this is then assumed to be by acoustic matching, with the infant comparing his output to that of his caregiver. There are theoretical and empirical problems with both of these assumptions, and we present a computational model- Elija-that does not learn to pronounce speech sounds this way. Elija starts by exploring the sound making capabilities of his vocal apparatus. Then he uses the natural responses he gets from a caregiver to learn equivalence relations between his vocal actions and his caregiver's speech. We show that Elija progresses from a babbling stage to learning the names of objects. This demonstrates the viability of a non-imitative mechanism in learning to pronounce.

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References

1996Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants 1992Articulatory Phonology: An Overview 1986Towards an articulatory phonology 1989A Dynamical Approach to Gestural Patterning in Speech Production 2000The Emergence of the Speech Capacity 2008Social Feedback to Infants' Babbling Facilitates Rapid Phonological Learning 2001Causes and consequences of imitation 1973Auditory and phonetic memory codes in the discrimination of consonants and vowels

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2011Children's Development of Self-Regulation in Speech Production 2016Learning to Produce Syllabic Speech Sounds via Reward-Modulated Neural Plasticity 2014Learning to Pronounce First Words in Three Languages: An Investigation of Caregiver and Infant Behavior Using a Computational Model of an Infant 2012Computational modeling of phonetic and lexical learning in early language acquisition: Existing models and future directions 2013Brain responses and looking behavior during audiovisual speech integration in infants predict auditory speech comprehension in the second year of life

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