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Modeling the development of pronunciation in infant speech acquisition.

<24> In human development, it is believed infants learn the pronunciation of their first speech sounds in by imitation. Instead, in this highly cited paper, we propose that development is driven by self-organization and reformulative interaction with a caregiver. We demonstrated our hypothesis experimentally using Elija, a computational model of an infant, who is taught to produce first words by a human caregiver. Our model has fundamental implications, which influence current theories of speech production and perception, as acknowledged by other researchers (Plummer, US; Oudeyer, France; Räsänen, Finland).