{"pk":26215,"title":"Modeling language discrimination in infants using i-vector representations","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Experimental research suggests that at birth infants can dis-criminate two languages if they belong to different rhythmicclasses, and by 4 months of age they can discriminate two lan-guages within the same class provided they have been previ-ously exposed to at least one of them. In this paper, we presenta novel application of speech technology tools to model lan-guage discrimination, which may help to understand how in-fants achieve high performance on this task. By combininga Gaussian Mixture Model of the acoustic space and low-dimensional representations of novel utterances with a modelof a habituation paradigm, we show that brief exposure toFrench does not allow to discriminate between two previouslyunheard languages with similar phonological properties, butfacilitates discrimination of two phonologically distant lan-guages. The implications of these findings are discussed.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"language discrimination; speech; acoustics; com-putational models; habituation"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bz942s2","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"M.","middle_name":"Julia","last_name":"Carbajal","name_suffix":"","institution":"Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, ENS/EHESS/CNRS; 29, rue d’Ulm","department":""},{"first_name":"Radek","middle_name":"","last_name":"F ́er","name_suffix":"","institution":"Speech@FIT, Faculty of Information Technology, BUT; Bozetechova","department":""},{"first_name":"Emmanuel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Dupoux","name_suffix":"","institution":"Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, ENS/EHESS/CNRS; 29, rue d’Ulm","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26215/galley/15851/download/"}]}