Infant Phonetic Learning as Perceptual Space Learning: A Crosslinguistic Evaluation of Computational Models
Infant Phonetic Learning as Perceptual Space Learning: A Crosslinguistic Evaluation of Computational Models
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DOI：
10.1111/cogs.13314
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发表时间：
2023-07
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Yevgen Matusevych;Thomas Schatz;H. Kamper;Naomi H Feldman;S. Goldwater
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Yevgen Matusevych;Thomas Schatz;H. Kamper;Naomi H Feldman;S. Goldwater
在生命的第一年，婴儿的语言感知与他们母语的声音变得协调起来。这种早期语音学习的过程传统上被认为是语音范畴习得。然而，最近的研究假设，调谐可能反映了一种不涉及类别的知觉空间学习过程。在本文中，我们通过实现五种不同的知觉空间学习模型，并在三个语音对比上对它们进行测试，来探索知觉空间学习的思想。我们复制并扩展了之前的结果，该结果表明，仅使用关于短时间语音片段声学分布信息的知觉空间学习模型可以至少解释婴儿感知的一些跨语言差异。此外，我们还发现了第二个知觉空间学习模型，这得益于词级指导。在捕捉婴儿言语感知中的跨语言差异方面表现得同样出色。这些结果支持知觉空间学习作为早期语音学习理论的一般观点，但也表明需要更多细粒度的数据来区分不同的正式账户。最后，我们提供了两个最有希望的模型的可测试的经验预测，并表明这些模型并不完全相同，这使得在未来的研究中可以在婴儿实验中独立评估每个模型。
In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. This process of early phonetic learning has traditionally been framed as phonetic category acquisition. However, recent studies have hypothesized that the attunement may instead reflect a perceptual space learning process that does not involve categories. In this article, we explore the idea of perceptual space learning by implementing five different perceptual space learning models and testing them on three phonetic contrasts that have been tested in the infant speech perception literature. We reproduce and extend previous results showing that a perceptual space learning model that uses only distributional information about the acoustics of short time slices of speech can account for at least some crosslinguistic differences in infant perception. Moreover, we find that a second perceptual space learning model, which benefits from word-level guidance. performs equally well in capturing crosslinguistic differences in infant speech perception. These results provide support for the general idea of perceptual space learning as a theory of early phonetic learning but suggest that more fine-grained data are needed to distinguish between different formal accounts. Finally, we provide testable empirical predictions of the two most promising models and show that these are not identical, making it possible to independently evaluate each model in experiments with infants in future research.