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Project
Brains (Back) to Brussels 2011 - Verankering : A Cognitive and Computational Investigation of Combinatorial Speech. (BRGEOZ180)
I intend to investigate the cognitive mechanisms that give us combinatorial speech in order to establish how these mechanisms could have evolved. Combinatorial speech is the ability to make new words by recombining pre-existing speech sounds. Humans are the only apes that can do this, yet we do not know how our brains do it, nor how exactly we differ from other apes, and hence we cannot propose a plausible scenario of how it evolved. Using new experimental techniques to study human behavior and new computational techniques to model human cognition, I will find out how we deal with combinatorial speech and how this ability may have evolved.
The computer modeling part will formalize hypotheses about how our brains deal with combinatorial speech. Two models will be built: a high-level symbolic model that will establish the basic algorithms with which the building blocks of speech (phonemes, syllables) are learned from a continuous stream of speech, and a neural model that will establish in more detail how the algorithms are implemented in the brain. Both models must not only be able to learn speech, but also to produce utterance on the basis of what they have learned. In addition, the models, by increasing understanding of how humans deal with speech, will help bridge the performance gap between human and computer speech recognition.
The experimental part will study cultural learning. Experimental cultural learning is a new technique that simulates cultural evolution in the laboratory. Two types of cultural learning will be used: iterated learning, which simulates language transfer across generations, and social coordination, which simulates emergence of norms in a language community. Using the two types of cultural learning will help to zero in from two angles on how humans deal with combinatorial speech. In addition it will make a methodological contribution by comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the two methods as well as extending them to the hitherto unexplored domain of speech.
The project will advance science in four ways: it will provide insight into how our unique ability for using combinatorial speech works and how it evolved, it will tell us how this is implemented in the brain, it will extend the novel methodology of experimental cultural learning and it will create new computer models for dealing with human speech.
The computer modeling part will formalize hypotheses about how our brains deal with combinatorial speech. Two models will be built: a high-level symbolic model that will establish the basic algorithms with which the building blocks of speech (phonemes, syllables) are learned from a continuous stream of speech, and a neural model that will establish in more detail how the algorithms are implemented in the brain. Both models must not only be able to learn speech, but also to produce utterance on the basis of what they have learned. In addition, the models, by increasing understanding of how humans deal with speech, will help bridge the performance gap between human and computer speech recognition.
The experimental part will study cultural learning. Experimental cultural learning is a new technique that simulates cultural evolution in the laboratory. Two types of cultural learning will be used: iterated learning, which simulates language transfer across generations, and social coordination, which simulates emergence of norms in a language community. Using the two types of cultural learning will help to zero in from two angles on how humans deal with combinatorial speech. In addition it will make a methodological contribution by comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the two methods as well as extending them to the hitherto unexplored domain of speech.
The project will advance science in four ways: it will provide insight into how our unique ability for using combinatorial speech works and how it evolved, it will tell us how this is implemented in the brain, it will extend the novel methodology of experimental cultural learning and it will create new computer models for dealing with human speech.
Date:1 Feb 2012 → 31 Jan 2015
Keywords:Programming, Informatics, Artificial Intelligence, Www
Disciplines:Mathematical sciences and statistics