Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We compare the performance of humans (English and Frenchlisteners) versus an unsupervised speech model in a perceptionexperiment (ABX discrimination task). Although the ABXtask has been used for acoustic model evaluation in previousresearch, the results have not, until now, been compared di-rectly with human behaviour in an experiment. We show that astandard, well-performing model (DPGMM) has better accu-racy at predicting human responses than the acoustic baseline.The model also shows a native language effect, better resem-bling native listeners of the language on which it was trained.However, the native language effect shown by the models isdifferent than the one shown by the human listeners, and, no-tably, the models do not show the same overall patterns ofvowel confusions.