Bootstrapping the brain: unsupervised program learns baby talk

From Ars Technica's entry Bootstrapping the brain: unsupervised program learns baby talk:

In an attempt to understand how the brain acquires language recognition skills, researchers have created a program that successfully acquires either English or Japanese vowel recognition abilities without even knowing how many vowels it's being exposed to.

I know at least some of you are interested in language acquisition, so this might be interesting.