Journal article
Statistical learning of phonetic categories: insights from a computational approach
Developmental science, Vol.12(3), pp.369-378
04/2009
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00822.x
PMCID: PMC2742678
PMID: 19371359
Abstract
Recent evidence (Maye, Werker & Gerken, 2002) suggests that statistical learning may be an important mechanism for the acquisition of phonetic categories in the infant's native language. We examined the sufficiency of this hypothesis and its implications for development by implementing a statistical learning mechanism in a computational model based on a mixture of Gaussians (MOG) architecture. Statistical learning alone was found to be insufficient for phonetic category learning--an additional competition mechanism was required in order for the categories in the input to be successfully learnt. When competition was added to the MOG architecture, this class of models successfully accounted for developmental enhancement and loss of sensitivity to phonetic contrasts. Moreover, the MOG with competition model was used to explore a potentially important distributional property of early speech categories--sparseness--in which portions of the space between phonetic categories are unmapped. Sparseness was found in all successful models and quickly emerged during development even when the initial parameters favoured continuous representations with no gaps. The implications of these models for phonetic category learning in infants are discussed.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Statistical learning of phonetic categories: insights from a computational approach
- Creators
- Bob McMurray - Department of Psychology and the Delta Center, University of Iowa, Iowa City 52242, USA. bob-mcmurray@uiowa.eduRichard N AslinJoseph C Toscano
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Developmental science, Vol.12(3), pp.369-378
- DOI
- 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00822.x
- PMID
- 19371359
- PMCID
- PMC2742678
- NLM abbreviation
- Dev Sci
- ISSN
- 1363-755X
- eISSN
- 1467-7687
- Publisher
- Wiley; England
- Grant note
- R01 HD037082-09 / NICHD NIH HHS\nR01 DC008089 / NIDCD NIH HHS\nF31 DC006537-01 / NIDCD NIH HHS\nR01 DC008089-03 / NIDCD NIH HHS\nHD-37082 / NICHD NIH HHS\nDC006537 / NIDCD NIH HHS\nDC008089 / NIDCD NIH HHS\nF31 DC006537 / NIDCD NIH HHS\nR01 HD037082 / NICHD NIH HHS
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 04/2009
- Academic Unit
- Communication Sciences and Disorders; Linguistics; Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute; Otolaryngology
- Record Identifier
- 9984070125002771
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