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Old April 12th, 2007, 03:22 PM
James Brody James Brody is offline
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Default The Self-Organization of Speech Sounds

http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0502086

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Sony CSL Paris,
6, rue Amyot,
75005 Paris, France

Abstract

The speech code is a vehicle of language: it defines a set of forms used by a community to carry information. Such a code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be formed prior to the existence of linguistic interactions? Moreover, the human speech code is discrete and compositional, shared by all the individuals of a community but different across communities, and phoneme inventories are characterized by statistical regularities. How can a speech code with these properties form?

We try to approach these questions in the paper, using the " of the artificial" We build a society of artificial agents, and detail a mechanism that shows the formation of a discrete speech code without pre-supposing the existence of linguistic capacities or of coordinated interactions. The mechanism is based on a low-level model of sensory-motor interactions. We show that the integration of certain very simple and non language-specific neural devices leads to the formation of a speech code that has properties similar to the human speech code. This result relies on the self-organizing properties of a generic coupling between perception and production within agents, and on the interactions between agents. The artificial system helps us to develop better intuitions on how speech might have appeared, by showing how self-organization might have helped natural selection to find speech.
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Old April 12th, 2007, 03:24 PM
James Brody James Brody is offline
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Default Statistical Mechanical Approach to Human Language

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510019

Authors: Kosmas Kosmidis, Alkiviadis Kalampokis, Panos Argyrakis

(Submitted on 4 Oct 2005)

Abstract: We use the formulation of equilibrium statistical mechanics in order to study some important characteristics of language. Using a simple expression for the Hamiltonian of a language system, which is directly implied by the Zipf law, we are able to explain several characteristic features of human language that seem completely unrelated, such as the universality of the Zipf exponent, the vocabulary size of children, the reduced communication abilities of people suffering from schizophrenia, etc. While several explanations are necessarily only qualitative at this stage, we have, nevertheless, been able to derive a formula for the vocabulary size of children as a function of age, which agrees rather well with experimental data.
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