The emergence of words: Modelling early language acquisition with a dynamic systems perspective

This paper introduces a computational model of early language acquisition that is able to build word-like units from cross-modal stimuli (acoustic and pseudo-visual). The ar-chitecture, data processing and internal rep-resentations of the model strives for ecological plausibility, and is therefore inspired by cur-rent cognitive views of preverbal infant lan-guage learning behaviour. In this paper, we attempt to visualise the emergence and de-velopment of the models internal representa-tions as an epigenetic landscape, which is a popular method for depicting the evolution of behaviour through the dynamic systems the-ory. We show that our computational model, through a general statistical learning mech-anism, displays similar properties to the dy-namic systems theory and supports the em-piricist view of human development. 1