A predictive coding framework for a developmental agent: Speech motor skill acquisition and speech production

Our goal is to investigate the process of speech motor skill acquisition and speech production in such an agent. Standard vocal exploration experiments show that it learns to generate speech-like sounds (acoustic babbling followed by proto-syllables and vowels) as well as the timing for motor command execution. Random goal exploration leads to the self-organization of developmental stages of vocal sequences in the agent due to increase in complexity of vocalization. The self-organization is invariant to certain acoustic feature representations. Self-exploration allows the agent to learn to imitate environmental sounds quickly. It learns to vocalize differently in different environments.