From Analogue to Digital Vocalizations

Sound is a medium used by humans to carry information. The existence of this kind of medium is a pre-requisite for language. It is organized into a code, called speech, which provides a repertoire of forms that is shared in each language community. This code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be formed prior to the existence of linguistic interactions? Moreover, the human speech code is characterized by several properties: speech is digital and compositional (vocalizations are made of units re-used systematically in other syllables); phoneme inventories have precise regularities as well as great diversity in human languages; all the speakers of a language community categorize sounds in the same manner, but each language has its own system of categorization, possibly very different from every other. How can a speech code with these properties form? These are the questions we will approach in the paper. We will study them using the method of the artificial. We will build a society of artificial agents, and study what mechanisms may provide answers. This will not prove directly what mechanisms were used for humans, but rather give ideas about what kind of mechanism may have been used. This allows us to shape the search space of possible answers, in particular by showing what is sufficient and what is not necessary. The mechanism we present is based on a low-level model of sensory-motor interactions. We show that the integration of certain very simple and non language-specific neural devices allows a population of agents to build a speech code that has the properties mentioned above. The originality is that it pre-supposes neither a functional pressure for communication, nor the ability to have coordinated social interactions (they do not play language or imitation games). It relies on the self-organizing properties of a generic coupling between perception and production both within agents, and on the interactions between agents

The self-organization of combinatoriality and phonotactics in vocalization systems

This paper shows how a society of agents can self-organize a shared vocalization system that is discrete, combinatorial and has a form of primitive phonotactics, starting from holistic inarticulate vocalizations. The originality of the system is that: (1) it does not include any explicit pressure for communication; (2) agents do not possess capabilities of coordinated interactions, in particular they do not play language games; (3) agents possess no specific linguistic capacities; and (4) initially there exists no convention that agents can use. As a consequence, the system shows how a primitive speech code may bootstrap in the absence of a communication system between agents, i.e. before the appearance of language

The evolution of auditory contrast

This paper reconciles the standpoint that language users do not aim at improving their sound systems with the observation that languages seem to improve their sound systems. Computer simulations of inventories of sibilants show that Optimality-Theoretic learners who optimize their perception grammars automatically introduce a so-called prototype effect, i.e. the phenomenon that the learner’s preferred auditory realization of a certain phonological category is more peripheral than the average auditory realization of this category in her language environment. In production, however, this prototype effect is counteracted by an articulatory effect that limits the auditory form to something that is not too difficult to pronounce. If the prototype effect and the articulatory effect are of a different size, the learner must end up with an auditorily different sound system from that of her language environment. The computer simulations show that, independently of the initial auditory sound system, a stable equilibrium is reached within a small number of generations. In this stable state, the dispersion of the sibilants of the language strikes an optimal balance between articulatory ease and auditory contrast. The important point is that this is derived within a model without any goal-oriented elements such as dispersion constraints

Sobre el desarrollo histórico del sistema fonético del inglés: un enfoque lingüístico-sinérgico

El artículo presenta un enfoque metodológico novedoso para el estudio del desarrollo del lenguaje, a saber, una sinergia diacrónica. El propósito de la presente investigación es, mediante la divulgación de las características sinérgicas del sistema fonético, revelar la potencia heurística y la aplicabilidad de los principios del paradigma sinérgico a los estudios del lenguaje. Los autores afirman que el sistema fonético del lenguaje posee características sinérgicas y cambia de acuerdo con principios comunes de desarrollo de sistemas complejos. Los autores prueban que los cambios en el sistema fonético no son caóticos ni aleatorios, ya que están pre condicionados por las características del propio sistema. La importancia teórica de la presente investigación radica en la ampliación de nuestro conocimiento del lenguaje como sistema sinérgico, en general, y de los rasgos sinérgicos del sistema fonético del inglés, en particular. Los datos obtenidos se pueden emplear en su totalidad de forma práctica en conferencias y seminarios sobre la historia del inglés, la fonética teórica y la lingüística históric

The synthetic modeling of language origins

This paper surveys work on the computational modeling of the origins and evolution of language. The main approaches are described and some example experiments from the domains of the evolution of communication, phonetics, lexicon formation, and syntax are discussed.The writing of this paper was sponsored by the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris.Peer reviewe

The Self-Organization of Speech Sounds

The speech code is a vehicle of language: it defines a set of forms used by a community to carry information. Such a code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be formed prior to the existence of linguistic interactions? Moreover, the human speech code is discrete and compositional, shared by all the individuals of a community but different across communities, and phoneme inventories are characterized by statistical regularities. How can a speech code with these properties form? We try to approach these questions in the paper, using the ``methodology of the artificial''. We build a society of artificial agents, and detail a mechanism that shows the formation of a discrete speech code without pre-supposing the existence of linguistic capacities or of coordinated interactions. The mechanism is based on a low-level model of sensory-motor interactions. We show that the integration of certain very simple and non language-specific neural devices leads to the formation of a speech code that has properties similar to the human speech code. This result relies on the self-organizing properties of a generic coupling between perception and production within agents, and on the interactions between agents. The artificial system helps us to develop better intuitions on how speech might have appeared, by showing how self-organization might have helped natural selection to find speech

Sobre el desarrollo histórico del sistema fonético del inglés: un enfoque lingüístico-sinérgico

The article advances a novel methodological approach to the study of language development, namely a diachronic synergetics. The purpose of the present research is, through disclosing synergetic features of the phonetic system, to reveal heuristic potency and applicability of principles of the synergetic paradigm to language studies. The authors claim that the phonetic system of language possesses synergetic features and it changes according to common principles of development of complex systems. The authors prove that changes in the phonetic system are neither chaotic nor random, since they are preconditioned by the features of the system itself. The theoretical significance of the present research lies in the widening of our knowledge of language as a synergetic system, and of synergetic features of the phonetic system of English, in particular. The obtained data can be fully employed practically into lectures and seminars on the history of English, theoretical phonetics, and historical linguistics.El artículo presenta un enfoque metodológico novedoso para el estudio del desarrollo del lenguaje, a saber, una sinergia diacrónica. El propósito de la presente investigación es, mediante la divulgación de las características sinérgicas del sistema fonético, revelar la potencia heurística y la aplicabilidad de los principios del paradigma sinérgico a los estudios del lenguaje. Los autores afirman que el sistema fonético del lenguaje posee características sinérgicas y cambia de acuerdo con principios comunes de desarrollo de sistemas complejos. Los autores prueban que los cambios en el sistema fonético no son caóticos ni aleatorios, ya que están precondicionados por las características del propio sistema. La importancia teórica de la presente investigación radica en la ampliación de nuestro conocimiento del lenguaje como sistema sinérgico, en general, y de los rasgos sinérgicos del sistema fonético del inglés, en particular. Los datos obtenidos se pueden emplear en su totalidad de forma práctica en conferencias y seminarios sobre la historia del inglés, la fonética teórica y la lingüística histórica

Artificial Creative Systems: Completing the Creative Cycle

Human creativity is personally, socially and culturally situated: creative individuals work within environments rich in personal experiences, social relationships and cultural knowledge. Computational models of creative processes typically neglect some or all of these aspects of human creativity. How can we hope to capture this richness in computational models of creativity? This paper introduces recent work at the Design Lab where we are attempting to develop a model of artificial creative systems that can combine important aspects at personal, social and cultural levels

Speech Development by Imitation

The Double Cone Model (DCM) is a model of how the brain transforms sensory input to motor commands through successive stages of data compression and expansion. We have tested a subset of the DCM on speech recognition, production and imitation. The experiments show that the DCM is a good candidate for an artificial speech processing system that can develop autonomously. We show that the DCM can learn a repertoire of speech sounds by listening to speech input. It is also able to link the individual elements of speech to sequences that can be recognized or reproduced, thus allowing the system to imitate spoken language