Towards the Acquisition of a Sensorimotor Vocal Tract Action Repository within a Neural Model of Speech Processing

Abstract

While a mental lexicon stores phonological, grammatical and semantic features of words, a vocal tract action repository is assumed to store inner motor and sensory representations of speech items (i.e. the sounds, syllables and words) of the speaker's native language. On the basis of a neural model of speech processing, which comprises important cognitive and sensorimotor aspects of speech production, perception, and acquisition (Speech Commun 51, 793-809, 2009), this paper will outline how a sensorimotor vocal tract action repository can be acquired in a self-organizing neural network structure which is trained using unsupervised associative learning.