Blog Archives

Computing the reliability of acoustic information in speech

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 →

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Posted in Presentations

Acquiring and adapting phonetic categories in a computational model of speech perception

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 →

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A common mechanism for the acquisition of phonetic categories during development and perceptual learning in adulthood

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 →

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Modeling age of exposure in L2 learning of vowel categories

Clayards, M. & Toscano, J. C. (2010, August). Poster presented at the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Portland, OR.

Abstract: Age of exposure is known to be an important indicator of second language proficiency. Native-like phonological proficiency is attained only by learners exposed at the earliest ages. This paper examines one account of age-of-exposure effects... Read more →

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Online processing of acoustic cues in speech perception

Comparing statistical and neural network models

Toscano, J. C. & McMurray, B. (2008, November). Poster presented at the 156th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Miami, FL.

PDF of poster.. Read more →

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Statistical learning of phonetic categories: Insights from a computational approach

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 →

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Posted in Journal Articles