A Constructive Model of Mother-Infant Interaction towards Infant’s Vowel Articulation

Abstract

Human infants seem to develop to acquire\ncommon phonemes to adults without the capability\nto articulate or any explicit knowledge.\nTo understand such unrevealed human\ncognitive development, building a robot\nwhich reproduces such a developmental process\nseems effective. It will also contribute to\na design principle for a robot that can communicate\nwith human beings. This paper hypothesizes\nthat the caregiver’s parrotry to the\ncoo of the robot plays an important role in the\nphoneme acquisition process based on the implication\nfrom behavioral studies, and propose\na constructive model for it. We validate the\nproposed model by examining whether a real\nrobot can acquire Japanese vowels through interactions\nwith its caregiver.