Investigating the role of infant-directed speech with a computer model

Abstract

A computer model (expectation maximization of a mixture of Gaussians) is used to learn the positions of vowel categories from two sets of recorded words. The number of vowels is known beforehand. The results show that vowel positions learned on the basis of infant-directed (ID) speech correspond better to those in the input than those learned on the basis of adult-directed (AD) speech.