Research and Courses
Course: Evolution of Speech
This course is a master's course for students of artificial intelligence and of phonetics.
After following the course, students will have a basic knowledge of the background information of the evolution of speech, and will have studied a number of example computer models of the evolution of speech.
In order to make the course accessible to students from different backgrounds, variants with stronger or weaker focus on computer modeling can be given.
For more information click here.
Research: Modeling the evolution of Speech
I investigate the evolution of speech and I use computer models for this purpose. With speech I mean the acoustic signals that are used for communicating language. However, in order to understand evolution it is also sometimes necessary to look at acoustic signals that are not used for language (such as involuntary vocalizations by humans, or animal vocalizations). It is also sometimes necessary to look at non-acoustic signals that are used for language, such as sign language.
Evolution in this project is mostly biological evolution: slow change over the generations of the genetic endowment for using speech. Another type of evolution that occurs in language is cultural evolution, which results in language change. This type of evolution isstudied less directly in this project (at the moment). However, it is clear that the evolution of speech and language can only be understood as a complex interaction between cultural and biological factors.
As evolution is a complex process, computer simulations can be helpful in investigating it. In this project two types of simulation are used: acoustic simulations of vocal tracts and agent-based simulations of interactions in a population of language users. At the moment, the focus of the research is on modeling the vocal tracts of apes and hypothetical human ancestors, but as soon as good models are available, agent-based simulations will be based on them.
This project is funded by a Vidi-grant from the NWO.