This Presidential Young Investigator award will enable the investigator to pursue an integrated program of research on the production and perception of speech, including the development of these capacities in children acquiring their native language. The investigator has developed a model of speech production which has become extremely influential in the field. He has identified a number of shortcoming in the model, particularly with respect to questions of the timing of speech. He is now exploring a new family of algorithm which show promise for a better treatment of the timing issues, and which also appear to relate interestingly to phenomena of speech perception. During the ensuing grant period, he will pursue this theoretical development in depth, with particular reference to the problem of modeling inter-work phenomena. The research plans also include further theoretical and empirical work on the problem of speech acquisition. There is a fundamental question of acquisition related to the problem of how it is an infant can learn to perform the complex motor activities of speech based on the acoustic data the child receives as a model. The investigator has developed a hypothesis that speech acquisition is based on the development of an internal model of the vocal tract during babbling, and will be exploring its implications, including implications for the perceptual correlates of coarticulation. The hypothesis makes certain predictions about the order of acquisition of various speech sounds, and another research direction is to test the empirical validity of these predictions.
