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{
    "pk": 50178,
    "title": "A Computational Model of Human Vocal Imitation",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Humans have the remarkable intuitive ability to use their voices to imitate any sound they hear. For example, imagine conveying the sound of an engine to a mechanic, a birdcall to a friend, or a strange new synthesizer to a musician. Vocal imitation is fundamental to human communication, and may even form the basis of early language learning. But it is also mysterious: how do we use the limited affordances of a vocal tract to communicate novel sounds far beyond its reach? We propose that the answer lies in recursive social reasoning: we present a computational model of vocal imitation that extends the Rational Speech Acts framework with a simulated vocal tract for the speaker, and a feature-based model of auditory perception for the listener. Without fitting any parameters, our model accurately predicts the types of phones human speakers choose when imitating a variety of real-world sounds (R^2 = 0.809).",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Audition; Language Production; Pragmatics; Bayesian modeling; Computational Modeling"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Member Abstracts with Poster Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5sw9v2m7",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Matthew",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Caren",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "MIT",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Kartik",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Chandra",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "MIT",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Joshua",
            "middle_name": "B.",
            "last_name": "Tenenbaum",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "MIT",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Jonathan",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Ragan-Kelley",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "MIT",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Karima",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Ma",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50178/galley/38140/download/"
        }
    ]
}