[ACT-R-users] Models of listening to continuous speech?

[Richard M Young]

Hello Bonnie,

Some years ago, following on from David Huss's work with Mike Byrne, 
Martin Greaves and I played around with simple models using the 
audicon to deal with lists of isolated words in a short-term memory 
experiment.  At least in our hands, the audicon was assumed to hold 
"words" in some unspecified phonemic/phonological/articulatory code, 
which therefore required an access to DM/LTM in order to retrieve the 
word as a lexical item.

As I remember it -- which is not well -- we found it a bit clunky to 
use the audicon to deal with ephemeral material spread out in time. 
With no disrespect to those who had worked on it, I think it's fair 
to say that not much thought had been given to the underlying design 
of a transducer dealing with speech sounds.  For example, I *think* 
we had to add an END signal to indicate the silence following the 
last item in a list.

Martin later build partial models of the running memory span task 
using a similar approach, and included them in his PhD thesis.  He 
may be able to add to what I'm saying here.

Word recognition in speech is a well-studied area in cognitive 
psychology, and there are some good (ad hoc) models around, and I 
believe a reasonable amount of consensus.  It had crossed my mind 
from time to time that it would be an interesting area to bring into 
contact with Act-R.  There are of course Act-R models of the lexical 
retrieval stage itself.

Good luck!

~ Richard

At 11:18 -0400 11/8/09, Bonnie John wrote:
>Folks,
>
>Anyone have an models using ACT-R's Audition Module to listen to and
>comprehend continuous speech?
>If not continuous speech, how about short phrases or anything other than
>tones?
>Any experience using the Audition Module at all?
>
>I'm asking because I'd like to make models of ACT-R using the JAWS
>screen reader to navigate a web site and compare it to ACT-R models of
>visually navigating a web site. I'd like to read papers or speak with
>someone who has had experience with the Audition Module to get a
>heads-up on peaks and pitfalls.
>
>I did browse the Publications page, but could only find papers that use
>vision (but I could have missed the listening ones - apologies if I did).
>
>Thanks,
>Bonnie