This review describes a computational approach for modeling the development of speech motor control in infants. We address the development of two levels of control: articulation of individual speech sounds (defined here as phonemes, syllables, or words for which there is an optimized motor program) and production of sound sequences such as phrases…

Most computational models of word segmentation are trained and tested on transcripts of speech, rather than the speech itself, and assume that speech is converted into a sequence of symbols prior to word segmentation. We present a way of representing speech corpora that avoids this assumption, and preserves acoustic variation present in speech. We…

This paper reports progress in developing a computer model of language acquisition in the form of (1) a generative grammar that is (2) algorithmically learnable from realistic corpus data, (3) viable in its large-scale quantitative performance and (4) psychologically real. First, we describe new algorithmic methods for unsupervised learning of…

There are numerous models of how speech segmentation may proceed in infants acquiring their first language. We present a framework for considering the relative merits and limitations of these various approaches. We then present a model of speech segmentation that aims to reveal important sources of information for speech segmentation, and to…

An infant girl's unusual phonological behavior was evaluated in light of a maternal model which appeared to exaggerate features of normal conversational speech. Parental responses to immature speech patterns may account for selected case study behaviors which have been reported in both the child phonology and child fluency literatures. (KM)

Investigates the linguistic abilities of a subgroup of grammatical specific language impaired (SLI) children, focusing on the use of referential expressions in a narrative discourse and providing insight into the underlying nature of grammatical SLI. Findings support the hypothesized modular nature of grammatical SLI children's underlying…