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LSLT: Craig Thorburn (LING)

Time: 
Thursday, October 07, 2021 - 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: 
Language Science Center and Zoom (https://go.umd.edu/lslt-zoom)

 

Learning speech sounds through a video game: A reinforcement account

Adults struggle to learn non-native speech categories in many experimental settings (Goto, 1971), but learn efficiently in a video game paradigm where non-native speech sounds have functional significance (Lim and Holt, 2011). Behavioral and neural evidence from this and other paradigms point toward the involvement of reinforcement learning mechanisms in speech category learning (Harmon et al., 2019; Lim et al., 2019). I formalize this hypothesis computationally and confirm that our reinforcement learning model simulates experimental data.