Caregiver’s auto-mirroring and infant’s articulatory development enable vowel sharing

We extend the auto-mirroring guidance model, which explains the process of sharing vowels between a caregiver and an infant, by introducing two transitional elements related to the infant’s articulatory development: One is the accuracy of the infant’s articulation improving along with the separation of his/her vowel prototypes. The other is the transition of the caregiver’s auditory perception of mapping the infant’s vowels onto her own ones. The extended model can simulate several additional aspects of vowel development, e.g., the rapid separation of infant vowels and their convergence and the transient rise of stretching motherese. Simulation results suggest a new picture of the process of vowel development, which explains how there are two transitional aspects of vowel separation and guidance, and they also suggest hypotheses on the causes of vowel separation and a caregiver’s motherese.

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