Bootstrapping the brain: unsupervised program learns baby talk
 

Nature-versus-nurture debates have been going on for centuries, but they have been steadily growing in sophistication as we learn more about how the brain functions and appreciate how self-organizing systems can produce elaborate behavior. One of the areas where the debate plays out is in the acquisition of language, where cognitive scientists have been arguing over whether the brain comes with some preset patterns that it fits language into, or whether it generates its entire language recognition system on the fly. In an attempt to help address this issue, some researchers have explored the ability of systems to generate their own language categorization system and, in the process, crafted a program that can learn to recognize vowels on its own.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...baby-talk.html