Salience-based reinforcement of a spiking neural network leads to increased syllable production

Canonical babbling is vocal babbling that contains syllabic patterning like that in adult speech. Its emergence during the first year of human infancy is one of the most significant pre-speech vocal motor milestones. This paper focuses on a spiking neural network model that controls the lip and jaw muscles of an articulatory speech synthesizer and learns to produce canonical babbling. The model was adapted to receive reinforcement when it produced a sound with high auditory salience. Salience-reinforced versions of the model increased their rates of canonical babbling over the course of learning more than their yoked controls. This supports the idea that both intrinsic reinforcement and social reinforcement both contribute to human acquisition of canonical babbling.

[1]  Christopher T. Kello,et al.  Plasticity, learning, and complexity in spiking networks. , 2012, Critical reviews in biomedical engineering.

[2]  Satrajit S. Ghosh,et al.  Neural modeling and imaging of the cortical interactions underlying syllable production , 2006, Brain and Language.

[3]  Bernd J. Kröger,et al.  Towards a neurocomputational model of speech production and perception , 2009, Speech Commun..

[4]  Christopher T. Kello,et al.  Critical branching neural networks. , 2013, Psychological review.

[5]  Minoru Asada,et al.  Vowel Acquisition Based on an Auto-Mirroring Bias with a Less Imitative Caregiver , 2012, Adv. Robotics.

[6]  Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,et al.  In Search of the Neural Circuits of Intrinsic Motivation , 2007, Front. Neurosci..

[7]  E. Izhikevich.  Solving the distal reward problem through linkage of STDP and dopamine signaling , 2007, BMC Neuroscience.

[8]  Tetsuya Ogata,et al.  Continuous vocal imitation with self-organized vowel spaces in Recurrent Neural Network , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[9]  J. Werker,et al.  Tuned to the signal: the privileged status of speech for young infants. , 2004, Developmental science.

[10]  Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,et al.  Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech , 2006, Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language.

[11]  M. Goldstein,et al.  Social interaction shapes babbling: Testing parallels between birdsong and speech , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[12]  Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,et al.  Curiosity-driven phonetic learning , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL).

[13]  Jochen Triesch,et al.  Building a Model of Infant Social Interaction , 2010 .

[14]  G. Westermann,et al.  A new model of sensorimotor coupling in the development of speech , 2004, Brain and Language.

[15]  Anne S. Warlaumont,et al.  A spiking neural network model of canonical babbling development , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL).

[16]  Eric Fosler-Lussier,et al.  Evaluating parameters for mapping adult vowels to imitative babbling , 2009, INTERSPEECH.

[17]  Minoru Asada,et al.  A constructivist approach to infants' vowel acquisition through mother–infant interaction , 2003, Connect. Sci..

[18]  D. Oller,et al.  Late onset canonical babbling: a possible early marker of abnormal development. , 1998, American journal of mental retardation : AJMR.

[19]  D. Oller.  The emergence of the speech capacity , 2000 .

[20]  Andrew P. King,et al.  Mothers provide differential feedback to infants' prelinguistic sounds , 2006 .

[21]  M. Goldstein,et al.  Consistent responses of human mothers to prelinguistic infants: the effect of prelinguistic repertoire size. , 1999, Journal of comparative psychology.

[22]  Gert Westermann,et al.  Self-production facilitates and adult input interferes in a neural network model of infant vowel imitation. , 2011 .

[23]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  Intrinsically Motivated Reinforcement Learning: An Evolutionary Perspective , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development.

[24]  Susan L. Denham.  An auditory model for the detection of perceptual onsets and beat tracking in singing , 2007 .

[25]  I. Howard,et al.  Modeling the development of pronunciation in infant speech acquisition. , 2011, Motor control.

[26]  Gert Westermann,et al.  Prespeech motor learning in a neural network using reinforcement , 2013, Neural Networks.