Effects of consonantal context on the learnability of vowel categories from infant-directed speech | Zendy

Frans Adriaans | Zendy

AI Assistant Blog Pricing

Home ZAIA Blog

Open Access

Effects of consonantal context on the learnability of vowel categories from infant-directed speech

Author(s) -

Frans Adriaans

Publication year - 2018

Publication title -

the journal of the acoustical society of america

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 0.619

H-Index - 187

eISSN - 1520-8524

pISSN - 0001-4966

DOI - 10.1121/1.5045192

Subject(s) - learnability , vowel , formant , context (archaeology) , categorization , mid vowel , speech recognition , linguistics , computer science , contrast (vision) , relative articulation , psychology , artificial intelligence , history , philosophy , archaeology

Recent studies have shown that vowels in infant-directed speech (IDS) are characterized by highly variable formant distributions. The current study investigates whether vowel variability is partially due to consonantal context, and explores whether consonantal context could support the learning of vowel categories from IDS. A computational model is presented which selects contexts based on frequency in the input and generalizes across contextual categories. Improved categorization performance was found on a vowel contrast in American-English IDS. The findings support a view in which the infant's learning mechanism is anchored in context, in order to cope with acoustic variability in the input.

The content you want is available to Zendy users.

Already have an account? Click here to sign in.

Having issues? You can contact us here

Accelerating Research