A model of infant speech perception and learning

Acknowledgements I'd like to thank Jochen Triesch for his supervision over the last year, during which he introduced me to the field of computational neuroscience. I thoroughly enjoyed his lectures (for instance on Reinforcement Learning) and his insights and advice whenever we discussed my work. Many thanks to Max Murakami. Having (in his master thesis) developed the original speech acquisition model, Max did a great job of patiently lecturing me on the ins and outs of Listen and Babble and its context: speech acquisition in the human brain. I learned a lot this past year in many areas; much of that is attributed to him. I thank my mother, Sarah Zurbuchen, for turning Swiss-English into proper English over the years, but also for correcting remaining spelling errors in this thesis. Special thanks to my dear wife, Tirza, who was willing to put up with my long programming evenings and politely listened to my musings about how 'this-and-that' might be connected to 'that-and-that' (before changing my mind again). She is a social worker and I'm glad she can cope with a case like me! Lastly, as did greater men like Newton, Maxwell and Faraday, I dedicate my efforts to the Creator of speech, who himself spoke through Christ Jesus.