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We present a computational model that learns a coupling between motor parameters and their sensory consequences in vocal production during a babbling phase. Based on the coupling, preferred motor parameters and prototypically perceived sounds develop concurrently. Exposure to an ambient language modifies perception to coincide with the sounds from the language. The model develops motor mirror neurons that are active when an external sound is perceived. An extension to visual mirror neurons for oral gestures is suggested.

This thesis describes HABLAR, a computational model of the sensorimotor foundations of early childhood phonological development. HABLAR (an acronym for "Hierarchical Articulatory Based Language Acquisition by Reinforcement learning" and Spanish for "to speak") is intended to replicate the major milestones of emerging speech and demonstrate key characteristics of normal development, including the phonetic characteristics of babble, systematic and context-sensitive patterns of sound substitutions and deletions, overgeneralization errors, and the emergence of adult phonemic organization. It should also mimic abnormal phonological development under certain conditions of damage or degradation. HABLAR simulates a complete sensorimotor system consisting of an auditory system that detects and categorizes speech sounds using only acoustic cues drawn from its linguistic environment, an articulatory system that generates synthetic speech based on a realistic computer model of the vocal tract, an...

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NOTE that (1) this article is accepted for publication in Language Learning and Development, a

This paper relates consonant development in first-language acquisition to the mastery of rhythmic structure, starting with the emergence of the “core syllable ” in babbling. We first review results on very early phonetic development that suggest how a rich hierarchy of language-specific metrical structures might emerge from a universal developmental progression of basic utterance rhythms in interaction with ambient language input. We then describe salient differences in prosodic structures across the languages being studied in a cross-language investigation of phonological development, in which we are eliciting and analyzing recordings from hundreds of children aged two years through five years who are acquiring Cantonese, English, Greek, or Japanese. Finally, we present examples of how patterns of disfluent consonant production differ across children acquiring the different languages in this set, in ways that seem to be related to the differences in metrical organization across the languages. 1.

When they first begin to talk, children show characteristic consonant errors, which are often described in terms that recall Neogrammarian sound change. For example, a Japanese child’s production of the word kimono might be transcribed with an initial postalveolar affricate, as in typical velar-softening sound changes. Broad-stroke reviews of errors list striking commonalities across children acquiring different languages, whereas quantitative studies reveal enormous variability across children, some of which seems related to differences in consonant frequencies across different lexicons. This paper asks whether the appearance of commonalities across children acquiring different languages might be reconciled with the observed variability by referring to the ways in which sound change might affect frequencies in the lexicon. Correlational analyses were used to assess relationships between consonant accuracy in a database of recordings of toddlers acquiring Cantonese, English, Greek, or Japanese and two measures of consonant frequency: one specific to the lexicon being acquired, the other an average frequency calculated for the other three languages. Results showed generally positive trends, although the strength of the trends differed across measures and across languages. Many outliers in plots depicting the relationships suggested historical contingencies that have conspired to make for unexpected paths, much as in biological evolution. “The history of life is not necessarily progressive; it is certainly not predictable. The earth’s creatures have evolved through a series of contingent and fortuitous events. ” (Gould, 1989) 1.

In a perception experiment, L1 Mandarin and L1 Japanese novice learners of Korean classified non-tense /s/- or tense /s*/initial Korean CV tokens. A mixed effects logistic regression model with acoustic cues as predictor variables was built for each L1 group, and each individual’s regression coefficients were interpreted to be the cue weighting used in identifying Korean /s / and /s*/. We propose that the weighting of L2 perceptual cues is influenced by the weighting of the same cues in the L1 perception of acousticaly similar contrasts, but that intra-L1 individual variation is great enough that the expected inter-L1 differences may appear less well defined.

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