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Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech

Online ISBN:
9780191711091
Print ISBN:
9780199289158
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris
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Published online:
1 January 2010
Published in print:
6 April 2006
Online ISBN:
9780191711091
Print ISBN:
9780199289158
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Speech is the principal supporting medium of language. This book considers how spoken language first emerged. It gives an original and integrated view of the interactions between self-organization and natural selection, reformulates questions about the origins of speech, and puts forward what at first sight appears to be a startling proposal — that speech can be spontaneously generated by the coupling of evolutionarily simple neural structures connecting perception and production. It explores this hypothesis by constructing a computational system to model the effects of linking auditory and vocal motor neural nets. It demonstrates that a population of agents which used holistic and unarticulated vocalizations at the outset is inexorably led to a state in which their vocalizations have become discrete, combinatorial, and categorized in the same way by all group members. Furthermore, the simple syntactic rules that have emerged to regulate the combinations of sounds exhibit the fundamental properties of modern human speech systems.

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