  During their first years of life, infants learn the language(s) of their
environment at an amazing speed despite large cross cultural variations in
amount and complexity of the available language input. Understanding this
simple fact still escapes current cognitive and linguistic theories. Recently,
spectacular progress in the engineering science, notably, machine learning and
wearable technology, offer the promise of revolutionizing the study of
cognitive development. Machine learning offers powerful learning algorithms
that can achieve human-like performance on many linguistic tasks. Wearable
sensors can capture vast amounts of data, which enable the reconstruction of
the sensory experience of infants in their natural environment. The project of
'reverse engineering' language development, i.e., of building an effective
system that mimics infant's achievements appears therefore to be within reach.
Here, we analyze the conditions under which such a project can contribute to
our scientific understanding of early language development. We argue that
instead of defining a sub-problem or simplifying the data, computational models
should address the full complexity of the learning situation, and take as input
the raw sensory signals available to infants. This implies that (1) accessible
but privacy-preserving repositories of home data be setup and widely shared,
and (2) models be evaluated at different linguistic levels through a benchmark
of psycholinguist tests that can be passed by machines and humans alike, (3)
linguistically and psychologically plausible learning architectures be scaled
up to real data using probabilistic/optimization principles from machine
learning. We discuss the feasibility of this approach and present preliminary
results.
