ABSTRACT
We describe the perceptual foundations of a sensorimotor model of early childhood phonetic and articulatory development. The moder’s auditory perception is sensitive to prosodic and syllabic structure and simulates the categorical phonetic perception of late infancy. Importantly, the model relies on exclusively acoustic cues and their statistical distribution in the linguistic environment, avoiding prior assumptions of articulatory-acoustic correlations or linguistic contrasts which are inappropriate for a model of perceptual development. The model detects and categorizes speech segments, which, despite their acoustic basis, correlate with linguistic events and articulatory gestures. The resulting representation supports not only word recognition but also the unique demands of articulatory motor control and its development. In simulations examining the distinctiveness and faithfulness of the representation, we find that it preserves and makes explicit information about the phonetic properties of the acoustic signal.
