Toscano, J. C. & McMurray, B. (2008). In B. C. Love, K. McRae, & V. M. Sloutsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 433-438). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Abstract: A great deal of behavioral evidence suggests that infants can use distributional statistics to learn speech sound categories. .. Read more →
Toscano, J. C., Galle, M. E., and McMurray, B. (2007, October). Poster presented at the 13th Midcontinental Workshop on Phonology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.
Toscano, J. C. and McMurray, B. (2005, November). Paper presented at the 11th Midcontinental Workshop on Phonology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
Abstract:
Infants learning the phonetic categories of their native language must recognize which distinctions are relevant to their language and which are not. While they initially discriminate both native and non-native phoneme contrasts, infants quickly learn to discriminate only those contrasts that are present in their language (Werker & Tees, 1984), and eventually form language-appropriate phonetic categories... Read more →
By building computer models of the speech system and running simulations with them, we are able to better understand how phonetic categories are learned and how listeners process speech sounds during word recognition. I use several types of models to study speech perception, including neural network and statistical models. Two of the specific problems I am working on are unsupervised learning and cue weighting... Read more →
