A Model of Infant Learning of Word Stress

Nine-month-old infants can distinguish the word-stress patterns of two artificial languages after a few minutes of exposure to words from one of the languages, apparently by making transitive inferences from known word-stress constraints to unknown constraints. We report on a neuralnetwork simulation of these data using the sibling-descendant cascade-correlation algorithm. The simulations cover the infant data and generate some predictions for further infant research.

[1]  David S. Touretzky,et al.  Connectionist Models and Linguistic Theory: Investigations of Stress Systems in Language , 1993, Cogn. Sci..

[2]  K. Jellinger.  Processes of Change in Brain and Cognitive Development Attention and Performance XXI , 2007 .

[3]  Thomas R. Schultz,et al.  A Connectionist Model of the Development of Transitivity , 2004 .

[4]  Thomas R. Shultz,et al.  Modeling Age Differences in Infant Category Learning. , 2004, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[5]  Antal van den Bosch,et al.  A Connectionist Model for Bootstrap Learning of Syllabic Structure. , 1998 .

[6]  Thomas R. Shultz,et al.  Neural Network Simulation of Infant Familiarization to Artificial Sentences: Rule-Like Behavior Without Explicit Rules and Variables. , 2001, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[7]  Denis Mareschal,et al.  Mechanisms of Categorization in Infancy. , 2000, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[8]  A Prince,et al.  Optimality: From Neural Networks to Universal Grammar , 1997, Science.

[9]  LouAnn Gerken,et al.  Nine-month-olds extract structural principles required for natural language , 2004, Cognition.

[10]  Shumeet Baluja,et al.  Reducing Network Depth in the Cascade-Correlation Learning Architecture, , 1994 .

[11]  T. Shultz.  Computational Developmental Psychology , 2003 .

[12]  R. Gómez,et al.  Infant artificial language learning and language acquisition , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[13]  D. J. Guest,et al.  Violable Constraints in Language Production: Testing the Transitivity Assumption of Optimality Theory , 2000 .

[14]  R. French,et al.  A connectionist account of asymmetric category learning in early infancy. , 2000, Developmental psychology.

[15]  B. Dresher,et al.  A computational learning model for metrical phonology , 1990, Cognition.