Evaluating computational models of infant phonetic learning across languages

Understand

In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language.

• Many accounts of this early phonetic learning exist, but computational models predicting the attunement patterns observed in infants from the speech input they hear have been lacking.
• A recent study presented the first such model, drawing on algorithms proposed for unsupervised learning from naturalistic speech, and tested it on a single phone contrast.
• Here we study five such algorithms, selected for their potential cognitive relevance.