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The acquisition of speech categories: beyond perceptual narrowing, beyond unsupervised learning and beyond infancy
Journal article   Peer reviewed

The acquisition of speech categories: beyond perceptual narrowing, beyond unsupervised learning and beyond infancy

Bob McMurray
Language, cognition and neuroscience, Vol.38(4), pp.419-445
2023
DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2022.2105367
PMCID: PMC10904032
PMID: 38425732
url
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10904032/pdf/nihms-1899929.pdfView
Open Access

Abstract

An early achievement in language is carving a variable acoustic space into categories. The canonical story is that infants accomplish this by the second year, when only unsupervised learning is plausible. I challenge this view, synthesising five lines of developmental, phonetic and computational work. First, unsupervised learning may be insufficient given the statistics of speech (including infant-directed). Second, evidence that infants "have" speech categories rests on tenuous methodological assumptions. Third, the fact that the ecology of the learning environment is unsupervised does not rule out more powerful error driven learning mechanisms. Fourth, several implicit supervisory signals are available to older infants. Finally, development is protracted through adolescence, enabling richer avenues for development. Infancy may be a time of organising the auditory space, but true categorisation only arises via complex developmental cascades later in life. This has implications for critical periods, second language acquisition, and our basic framing of speech perception.
 category learning development infancy language development speech categorization Speech perception statistical learning unsupervised learning

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