Learning from a tutor: Embodied speech acquisition and imitation learning

Abstract

This work presents a new developmentally inspired data-driven framework to bootstrap speech perception and imitation abilities in interaction with a tutor. The proposed system architecture extends our work presented in [1], that implements a cascade of interconnected layers to acquire the structure of speech in terms of phones, syllables and words. Here, we show how to couple such a perceptual model with a speech imitation system that is based on an acoustic synthesizer bound to produce speech sounds with a child's voice.