Preprint: Modeling phonological development

[David Plaut]

The following preprint is available via the Web or anonymous ftp.

    The Emergence of Phonology from the Interplay of Speech Comprehension
	    and Production: A Distributed Connectionist Approach

			       David C. Plaut
				      
			    Christopher T. Kello

		     Carnegie Mellon University and the
		  Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition

        To appear in B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The emergence of language. 
	Mahweh, NJ: Erlbaum. 

A distributed connectionist framework for phonological development is
proposed in which phonological representations are not predefined but emerge
under the pressure of mediating among acoustic, semantic, and articulatory
representations in the service of both comprehension and production.  Within
the framework, articulatory feedback during speech production is derived from
the acoustic consequences of the system's own articulations via a learned
forward model of the physical mapping relating articulation to acoustics.  An
implementation of the framework, in the form of a discrete-time simple
recurrent network, learned to comprehend, imitate, and intentionally name a
corpus of 400 monosyllabic words, and its errors in development showed
similar tendencies as those of young children.  Although only a first step,
the results provide support that the approach may ultimately form the basis
for a comprehensive account of phonological development.

[25 pages]

URL:  http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~plaut/papers/PlautKelloINPRESSchap.phon.ps.gz
FTP-host: cnbc.cmu.edu
FTP-file: pub/user/plaut/papers/PlautKelloINPRESSchap.phon.ps.gz

(Note: an uncompressed version can be found under papers/uncompressed/) 

-Dave
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David Plaut <plaut at cmu.edu>      Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and
Mellon Institute 115, CNBC     Departments of Psychology and Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University                  MI 115I, 412/268-5145 (fax -5060)  
4400 Fifth Ave., Pittsburgh PA 15213-2683      http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~plaut
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one." -Voltaire
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