{"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/"}]}