This Tuesday, Kasia Hitczenko will be visiting from the University of Maryland:
Using prosody to learn sound categories
Infants must learn the sound categories of their language, but this is difficult because there is variability in speech that causes overlap between categories and masks where the correct categories are. This work investigates whether incorporating knowledge of these systematic sources of variability can improve sound category learning. I present two models that incorporate one such source of variability, namely prosody, into two existing models of sound category learning and present preliminary results on simulated data from one of these models.