. a) Explain three reasons why speech recognition is such a hard problem. b) Explain and discuss three features you would want an artificial system to have to solve the speech recognition problem. Specifically discuss solutions given in the Speech Recognition lecture. Explain what problems in understanding human speech these solutions solve. Question 2. a) Explain how babies as young as 6 months of age are able to find word boundaries in sentences. In your answer, discuss the following terms: phonotactic constraints, stress patterns, and highly frequent words (lexical landmarks). b) Explain how 8-month-olds can distinguish between words and nonwords in completely novel speech that does not contain any clues such as intonation or phonotactic information. c) Discuss why babies can do these kinds of tasks but adults have a very hard time doing them. Question 3. [Note: parts c and d are worth the most points in this question] a) Create two novel words that conform to the phonotactics of English. Weve seen a number of these in class/in the textbook, such as wug and dax. Feel free to use ones from previous studies or make up your own words. Tell me what your novel words are. b) Give me the definitions of these novel words one should be an object label (noun) and the other an action label (verb). Do NOT use existing meanings, like ball or kick. Make sure the meanings are ones that a young child (2-3 years old) would be able to learn (., procrastinating is not likely a concept a 2 year old.) Keep it simple. For instance, if wug is an object, it could be a piece of paper torn into a long strip; or if wug is an action, it could be flapping your arms like a wounded bird. c) Describe how you would teach these novel words to a young child. For example, you can point to the strip of paper and call it a wug. Or you can line up a pencil, a stick, and a strip of paper and ask the child to hand you the wug.
