Acquiring the Mapping from Meaning to Sounds

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Abstract
One of the fundamental difficulties facing a child trying to acquire a language is that the association between meanings and sounds is for the most part an arbitrary one. In this work, we model this process using a recurrent neural network that is trained to map a set of plan vectors, representing meaning, to associated sequences of phonemes, representing the phonological structure of the surface forms. We evaluate the role of the similarity structure of the target forms (the adult vocabulary) and the similarity structure of the input forms (the semantic structure) on the evolution of the network's vocabulary. The model's performance offers a principled account of various phenomena associated with children's early vocabulary development including the difficulty of acquiring synonyms, the appearance of idiosyncratic forms and over-extension errors. The model makes several unexplored predictions for the developmental profiles of young children acquiring morphology.