Neural-network simulation of tonal categorization based on <i>F</i>0 velocity profiles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Perception studies have shown that by the age of six months, infants show particular response patterns to tones in their native language. The present study focuses on how infants might develop lexical tones in Man- darin. F0 is generally considered the main cue in tone perception. However, F0 patterns in connected speech display extensive contextual variability. Since speech input to infants consists mainly of multi-word utterances, tone learning must involve processes that can effectively resolve variability. In this study we explore the Target Approximation model (Xu and Wang, 2001) which characterizes surface F0 as asymptotic movements toward underlying pitch targets defined as simple linear functions. The model predicts that it is possible to infer underlying pitch targets from the manners of F0 movements. Using production data of three of the speakers from Xu (1997), we trained a self-organizing neural network with both F0 profiles and F0 velocity profiles as input. In the testing phase, velocity profiles yielded far superior categorization than F0 profiles. The results confirm that velocity profiles can effectively abstract away from surface variability and directly reflect underlying articulatory goals. The finding thus points to one way through which infants can successfully derive at phonetic categories from adult speech.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".