Exploring the Relative Role of Bottom-up and Top-down Information in Phoneme Learning

We test both bottom-up and top-down approaches in learning the phonemic status of the sounds of English and Japanese. We used large corpora of spontaneous speech to provide the learner with an input that models both the linguistic properties and statistical regularities of each language. We found both approaches to help discriminate between allophonic and phonemic contrasts with a high degree of accuracy, although top-down cues proved to be effective only on an interesting subset of the data.