Curiosity-driven phonetic learning

Abstract

This article studies how developmental phonetic learning can be guided by pure curiosity-driven exploration, also called intrinsically motivated exploration. Phonetic learning refers here to learning how to control a vocal tract to reach acoustic goals. We compare three different exploration strategies for learning the auditory-motor inverse model: random motor exploration, random goal selection with reaching, and curiosity-driven active goal selection with reaching. Using a realistic vocal tract model, we show how intrinsically motivated learning driven by competence progress can generate automatically developmental structure in both articulatory and auditory modalities, displaying patterns in line with some experimental data from infants.