Intelligent animals devote much time and energy to exploring and obtaining information, but
the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. We review recent developments on this …

A key feature of vocal ontogeny in a variety of taxa with extensive vocal repertoires is a
developmental pattern in which vocal exploration is followed by a period of category …

According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their
interactions with a dynamically changing environment by kee** themselves in sensory …

We bridge the gap between two issues in infant development: vocal development and
intrinsic motivation. We propose and experimentally test the hypothesis that general …

Modeling of evolution and development of language has principally utilized mature units of
spoken language, phonemes and words, as both targets and inputs. This approach cannot …

Most children can produce a few words by the end of their first year and rapidly acquire
almost 30 times as many words in the following year. Although this general pattern remains …

While the origin of language remains a somewhat mysterious process, understanding how
human language takes specific forms appears to be accessible by the experimental method …

At around 7 months of age, human infants begin to reliably produce well-formed syllables
containing both consonants and vowels, a behavior called canonical babbling. Over …

Infants learn to speak rapidly during their first years of life, gradually improving from simple
vowel-like sounds to larger consonant-vowel complexes. Learning to control their vocal tract …

Sensorimotor learning represents a challenging problem for natural and artificial systems.
Several computational models have been proposed to explain the neural and cognitive …