Canaan Breiss
University of Chicago, IL·Psychology
Children learn the sound system of their language quickly and from limited input. They figure out which sounds can combine and how patterns extend to new words.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
Computer Science
- Topics
phonology
sound patterns
language acquisition
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Run high-powered replications of earlier behavioral experiments on learning language sound patterns to establish which human inductive biases, or built-in learning preferences, are reliable.
- Design new experimental manipulations that separate language-specific from general-purpose cognitive mechanisms guiding how people learn sound systems.
- Use speech-trained neural networks as weakly biased learners to estimate what is learnable from speech alone, then give these models human-like biases to make them more data- and energy-efficient.
- Synthesize published evidence through meta-analysis and release an open database that gathers research on biases in sound-pattern learning.
More about the research
A long-standing question is whether people bring built-in preferences, called inductive biases, to this task, and whether those biases are specific to language or shared with general learning. The project tests these ideas to better understand how humans spot regularities and generalize patterns, and to inform the design of more efficient artificial intelligence (AI).
Why it matters
Clarifying which learning biases humans bring to language could improve our understanding of how people acquire language and generalize patterns. Building those human-like biases into speech-trained AI models could make them need less data and energy. An open evidence database would also give language researchers a lasting, shared resource for testing claims.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kyle Mahowald
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Social Science
Measure how speakers of a variety of languages choose deictic words such as "this," "that," "here," and "there" to refer to objects and locations, using cross-linguistic behavioral experiments.
Michael Brown
Villanova University, PA·Psychology·Early-career
Identify which sound information listeners use to tell spoken words apart by recording brain responses in the first few hundred milliseconds after hearing speech.
Fernando Llanos Lucas
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Neuroscience
Compare how speakers of languages with simpler versus more complex sound systems perceive key speech features, using auditory perception tasks.
The school
University of Chicago: 39 labs on PI Pages, $681M a year on research, 457 research doctorates a year.
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