Weak semantic context helps phonetic learning in a model of infant language acquisition

52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014 - Proceedings of the Conference

Volumn 1, Issue , 2014, Pages 1073-1083

  Frank, Stella ^a   Feldman, Naomi H ^b   Goldwater, Sharon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS;

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; PHONETIC INFORMATION; SEMANTIC CONTEXT; SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE; WORD MEANING;

SEMANTICS;

EID: 84906923553     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Conference Proceeding    
DOI: 10.3115/v1/p14-1101     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (46)

1. Frans Adriaans and Daniel Swingley. Distributional learning of vowel categories is supported by prosody in infant-directed speech. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), 2012.
2. E. Bergelson and D. Swingley. At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(9):3253-3258, Feb 2012.
3. David M. Blei, Thomas L. Griffiths, Michael I. Jordan, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. Hierarchical topic models and the nested Chinese restaurant process. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16, 2003.
4. Michael R. Brent and Jeffrey M. Siskind. The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition, 81(2):B33-B44, 2001.
5. Christos Christodoulopoulos, Sharon Goldwater, and Mark Steedman. Two decades of unsupervised POS induction: How far have we come? In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 575-584, Cambridge, MA, October 2010. Association for Computational Linguistics.
6. Bart de Boer and Patricia K. Kuhl. Investigating the role of infant-directed speech with a computer model. Acoustics Research Letters Online, 4(4): 129, 2003.
7. Brian Dillon, Ewan Dunbar, and William Idsardi. A single-stage approach to learning phonological categories: Insights from Inuktitut. Cognitive Science, 37(2):344-377, Mar 2013.
8. Micha Elsner, Sharon Goldwater, Naomi Feldman, and Frank Wood. A cognitive model of early lexical acquisition with phonetic variability. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2013.
9. Naomi H. Feldman, Thomas L. Griffiths, Sharon Goldwater, and James L. Morgan. A role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition. Psychological Review, 2013a.
10. Naomi H. Feldman, Emily B. Myers, Katherine S. White, Thomas L. Griffiths, and James L. Morgan. Word-level information influences phonetic learning in adults and infants. Cognition, 127(3): 427-438, 2013b.
11. Abdellah Fourtassi and Emmanuel Dupoux. A rudimentary lexicon and semantics help bootstrap phoneme acquisition. Submitted.
12. Michael C. Frank, Noah D. Goodman, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. Using speakers' referential intentions to model early cross-situational word learning. Psychological Science, 20(5): 578-585, 2009.
13. Manuela Friedrich and Angela D. Friederici. Word learning in 6-month-olds: Fast encoding-weak retention. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23 (11):3228-3240, Nov 2011.
14. Lakshmi J. Gogate and Lorraine E. Bahrick. Intersensory redundancy and 7-month-old infants' memory for arbitrary syllable-object relations. Infancy, 2(2):219-231, Apr 2001.
15. J. Hillenbrand, L. A. Getty, M. J. Clark, and K. Wheeler. Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97(5 Pt 1):3099-3111, May 1995.
16. P. W. Jusczyk and Elizabeth A. Hohne. Infants' memory for spoken words. Science, 277(5334): 1984-1986, Sep 1997.
17. Patricia K. Kuhl, Karen A. Williams, Francisco Lacerda, Kenneth N. Stevens, and Bjorn Lindblom. Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. Science, 255(5044):606-608, 1992.
18. Brian MacWhinney. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000.
19. D. R. Mandel, P. W. Jusczyk, and D. B. Pisoni. Infants' recognition of the sound patterns of their own names. Psychological Science, 6(5):314-317, Sep 1995.
20. Nivedita Mani and Kim Plunkett. Twelve-montholds know their cups from their keps and tups. Infancy, 15(5):445470, Sep 2010.
21. Jessica Maye, Daniel J. Weiss, and Richard N. Aslin. Statistical phonetic learning in infants: facilitation and feature generalization. Developmental Science, 11(1):122-134, Jan 2008.
22. Jessica Maye, Janet F Werker, and LouAnn Gerken. Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognition, 82(3):B101-B111, Jan 2002.
23. Andrew McCallum. MALLET: A machine learning for language toolkit, 2002.
24. Bob McMurray, Richard N. Aslin, and Joseph C. Toscano. Statistical learning of phonetic categories: insights from a computational approach. Developmental Science, 12(3):369-378, May 2009.
25. Tamara Nicol Medina, Jesse Snedeker, John C. Trueswell, and Lila R. Gleitman. How words can and cannot be learned by observation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(22):9014-9019, 2011.
26. Radford Neal. Markov chain sampling methods for Dirichlet process mixture models. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 9: 249-265, 2000.
27. Linda Polka and Janet F. Werker. Developmental changes in perception of nonnative vowel contrasts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 20(2):421-435, 1994.
28. Carl Rasmussen. The infinite Gaussian mixture model. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 13, 2000.
29. Andrew Rosenberg and Julia Hirschberg. Vmeasure: A conditional entropy-based external cluster evaluation measure. In Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2007.
30. Brandon C. Roy, Michael C. Frank, and Deb Roy. Relating activity contexts to early word learning in dense longitudinal data. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), 2012.
31. Rushen Shi and Janet F. Werker. The basis of preference for lexical words in 6-month-old infants. Developmental Science, 6(5):484-488, 2003.
32. M. Shukla, K. S. White, and R. N. Aslin. Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (15):6038-6043, Apr 2011.
33. Linda B. Smith and Chen Yu. Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics. Cognition, 106(3):1558-1568, 2008.
34. Christine L. Stager and Janet F. Werker. Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than in word-learning tasks. Nature, 388: 381-382, 1997.
35. D. Swingley. Contributions of infant word learning to language development. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1536):3617-3632, Nov 2009.
36. Yee Whye Teh. A hierarchical Bayesian language model based on Pitman-Yor processes. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 985-992, Sydney, 2006.
37. Tuomas Teinonen, Richard N. Aslin, Paavo Alku, and Gergely Csibra. Visual speech contributes to phonetic learning in 6-month-old infants. Cognition, 108:850-855, 2008.
38. Erik D. Thiessen. The effect of distributional information on children's use of phonemic contrasts. Journal of Memory and Language, 56(1):16-34, Jan 2007.
39. R. Tincoff and P. W. Jusczyk. Some beginnings of word comprehension in 6-month-olds. Psychological Science, 10(2):172-175, Mar 1999.
40. Ruth Tincoff and Peter W. Jusczyk. Six-montholds comprehend words that refer to parts of the body. Infancy, 17(4):432444, Jul 2012.
41. N. S. Trubetzkoy. Grundzüge der Phonologie. Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1939.
42. John C. Trueswell, Tamara Nicol Medina, Alon Hafri, and Lila R. Gleitman. Propose but verify: Fast mapping meets cross-situational word learning. Cognitive Psychology, 66:126-156, 2013.
43. G. K. Vallabha, J. L. McClelland, F. Pons, J. F. Werker, and S. Amano. Unsupervised learning of vowel categories from infant-directed speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(33):13273-13278, Aug 2007.
44. Janet F. Werker and Richard C. Tees. Crosslanguage speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 7:49-63, 1984.
45. H. Henny Yeung and Janet F. Werker. Learning words' sounds before learning how words sound: 9-month-olds use distinct objects as cues to categorize speech information. Cognition, 113(2): 234-243, Nov 2009.
46. Chen Yu and Linda B. Smith. Rapid word learning under uncertainty via cross-situational statistics. Psychological Science, 18(5):414-420, 2007.