Connectionist Modeling and the Microstructure of Phonological Development: A Progress Report

Children learning to pronounce the sounds of their languages exhibit individual differences and a varying but often high degree of regularity in their rendering of adult words. The mappings from adult to child words show great phonetic context dependency and considerable stability over time, but often much lexical irregularity and other ‘unruly behavior’. Standard child phonology models, derived from adult-based phonological theory, ignore such unruly phenomena as non-rule-governed template matching, crosstalk between rules, and fuzzy boundaries of rule domains. Connectionist learning models are in principle well adapted to simulating these properties; a model in progress, GEYKO, is sketched. Children have access to several feedback loops in learning to pronounce, both internal (auditory, motor, proprioceptive) and external (parental social and material reinforcement). GEYKO’s speech gesture planning module is intended to learn production with the aid of such feedback, and its auditory planning module will learn perceptual categorization of spectral data by unsupervised learning methods.

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