* * NOTE ROOM CHANGE TO C154 * *


                UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
           COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                          presents

         "MODELLING CAREGIVER TUTORED DEVELOPMENT
             OF PRONUNCIATION IN A YOUNG CHILD" *

                    Dr. Ian S. Howard
      (Computational & Biological Learning Laboratory,
                 University of Cambridge, UK)

                12 October 2011 (Wednesday)
                       Room C154

                 Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                         1-2 pm

                 Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                 Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

Imitation is almost always assumed to be the mechanism by which infants
learn to pronounce speech sounds, which are the elements from which
words are made up. It is generally believed that auditory matching
enables a child to reproduce speech sounds by copying those that he
hears. For several reasons, we believe that this is not the way that
this systemic aspect of pronunciation is acquired. We demonstrate an
alternative account involving a non-imitative mechanism using Elija, a
computational model of an infant. Elija started by learning to babble in
an unsupervised fashion. Separate experiments were then run with Elija
using native speakers of English, French and German to play the role
of the caregiver. Each caregiver interacted with a different instance
of Elija in his or her native language. Using the tutored interactions
from each caregiver, which involved their reformulations of his putative
speech sounds, Elija learned the importance of his productions, and
the correspondence between his and adult speech tokens. We give example
of how the caregivers interpreted his output in terms of their native
languages and responded accordingly. The reformulation process develops
his ability to imitate a series of such tokens, that is, of words. Using
this newly acquired ability to parse input speech sounds in terms of the
equivalents to his own tokens, each caregiver taught Elija to speak some
simple words by serial imitation.   We give examples of words that Elija
learned to speak in this fashion in English, French and German. Finally
we discuss the implications of this work.

* This is joint work with Piers Messum (Centre for Human Communication,
University College London, UK).


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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq