Invited talk presented at the Dept. of Linguistics, Northwestern University, May 2013.
Abstract: Many researchers have observed that speech sounds vary considerably across different contexts, an issue known as the lack of invariance. Given this variability, how much information is conveyed by individual acoustic cues? That is, how reliably do specific cues distinguish phonological contrasts?.. Read more →
Toscano, J. C. (2013, April). Invited paper presented at the Workshop on Current Issues and Methods in Speaker Adaptation, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.
Abstract:
Recent work on perceptual adaptation has demonstrated that listeners can learn novel distributions of acoustic cues in unsupervised learning tasks with only a small amount of experience (Clayards, Tanenhaus, Aslin, & Jacobs, 2008, Cognition; Munson, 2011, dissertation)... Read more →
Toscano, J. C. (2013, February). Invited paper presented at the Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Abstract: During language acquisition, one of the first tasks encountered by infants is determining which sounds indicate phonological distinctions in their language and which do not. This is a particularly challenging problem, since it requires unsupervised learning (i.e.,.. Read more →
Toscano, J. C., & McMurray, B. (2010). Cognitive Science, 34, 434-464.
Abstract: During speech perception, listeners make judgments about the phonological category of sounds by taking advantage of multiple acoustic cues for each phonological contrast. Perceptual experiments have shown that listeners weight these cues differently. How do listeners weight and combine acoustic cues to arrive at an overall estimate of the category for a speech sound?.. Read more →
McMurray, B., Aslin, R. N., & Toscano, J. C. (2009). Developmental Science, 12, 369-378.
Abstract: Recent evidence (Maye, Werker & Gerken, 2002) suggests that statistical learning may be an important mechanism for the acquisition of phonetic categories in the infant’s native language. We examined the sufficiency of this hypothesis and its implications for development by implementing a statistical learning mechanism in a computational model based on a mixture of Gaussians (MOG) architecture... Read more →
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 →
