EARLY LANGUAGE AS MULTIMODAL LEARNING

摘要

We introduce a model of word learning in infants based on cross-modal interactions. Our model employs an architecture consisting of two Self-organizing maps (SOMs), representing the visual and auditory modalities, which are connected by Hebbian links. In contrast to previous models using a similar architecture, our model employs active Hebbian connections which propagate activation between the visual and auditory maps during learning. Our results show that categorical perception emerges from these early audio-visual interactions in both domains. We argue that the learning mechanism introduced in our model could be behind the facilitation of infants categorization through verbal labelling reported in the literature.