Infants’ vocalizations analyzed with an articulatory model: A preliminary report

Abstract

Articulatory exploration enables the infant to discover abilities of the vocal tract and learn relationships between movements and percepts. However, neither direct measurements nor transcription methods have access to tongue configurations in pre-linguistic infant vocalizations. A statistical articulatory-acoustic model integrating the non-linear growth of the human vocal tract was used to describe infant behavior before and at the beginning of canonical babbling. Analyses were developed to assess from a set …