Seminaire: Quantitative models of early language acquisition, Emmanuel Dupoux

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:40:17 +0100
From: Nadéra Bureau <nadera.bureau at lpl-aix.fr>
Message-ID: <001e01cdd77b$2634dbc0$729e9340$@bureau at lpl-aix.fr>


Brain & Language Research Institute

Vendredi 21 décembre 2012

11h Salle des Voûtes Fédération de Recherche 3 C (Comportement, Cerveau,
Cognition)

3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille (Labex BLRI)

Emmanuel DUPOUX

Quantitative models of early language acquisition

Résumé : The past 40 years of psycholinguistic research has shown that
infants learn their first language at an impressive speed. During the
first year of life, even before they start to talk, infants converge on
the basic building blocks of the phonological structure of their
language. Yet, the mechanisms that they use to achieve this early
phonological acquisition are still not well known. We show that a
modeling approach based on machine learning algorithms and speech
technology applied to large speech databases can help to shed light on
the early pattern of development. First, we argue that because of
acoustic variability, phonemes cannot be acquired directly from the
acoustic signal; only highly context dependent and talker dependent
phones or phones fragments can be extracted in a bottom-up way. Second,
words cannot be acquired directly from the acoustic signal either, but a
small number of protowords or sentence fragments can be extracted on the
basis of repetition frequency. Third, these two kinds of protolinguistic
units can interact with one another in order to converge with more
abstract units.  The proposal is therefore that the different levels of
the phonological system are acquired in parallel, through increasingly
more precise approximations. This accounts for the largely overlapping
development of lexical and phonological knowledge during the first year
of life.

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