The Role of Reference in Cross-Situational Word Learning (2018, Cognition)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Hao Wang ◽  
Toben Herbert Mintz
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Statistical Information ◽  
Unlimited Number ◽  
Referential Ambiguity ◽  
Situational Learning

Word learning involves massive ambiguity, since in a particular encounter with a novel word, there are an unlimited number of potential referents. One proposal for how learners surmount the problem of ambiguity is that learners use cross-situational statistics to constrain the ambiguity: When a word and its referent co-occur across multiple situations, learners will associate the word with the correct referent. Yu & Smith (2007) propose that these co-occurrence statistics are sufficient for word-to-referent mapping. Alternative accounts hold that co-occurrence statistics alone are insufficient to support learning, and that learners are further guided by knowledge that words are referential (e.g., Waxman & Gelman, 2009). However, no behavioral word learning studies we are aware of explicitly manipulate subjects’ prior assumptions about the role of the words in the experiments in order to test the influence of these assumptions. In this study, we directly test whether, when faced with referential ambiguity, co-occurrence statistics are sufficient for word-to-referent mappings in adult word-learners. Across a series of cross-situational learning experiments, we varied the degree to which there was support for the notion that the words were referential. At the same time, the statistical information about the words’ meanings was held constant. When we overrode support for the notion that words were referential, subjects failed to learn the word-to-referent mappings, but otherwise they succeeded. Thus, cross-situational statistics were useful only when learners had the goal of discovering mappings between words and referents. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of word learning in children’s language acquisition.

Using Speakers' Referential Intentions to Model Early Cross-Situational Word Learning

2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 578-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Frank ◽  
Noah D. Goodman ◽  
Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Computational Model ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Mutual Exclusivity ◽  
Object Individuation ◽  
Word Meanings ◽  
Inference Problems ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Situational Learning

Word learning is a “chicken and egg” problem. If a child could understand speakers' utterances, it would be easy to learn the meanings of individual words, and once a child knows what many words mean, it is easy to infer speakers' intended meanings. To the beginning learner, however, both individual word meanings and speakers' intentions are unknown. We describe a computational model of word learning that solves these two inference problems in parallel, rather than relying exclusively on either the inferred meanings of utterances or cross-situational word-meaning associations. We tested our model using annotated corpus data and found that it inferred pairings between words and object concepts with higher precision than comparison models. Moreover, as the result of making probabilistic inferences about speakers' intentions, our model explains a variety of behavioral phenomena described in the word-learning literature. These phenomena include mutual exclusivity, one-trial learning, cross-situational learning, the role of words in object individuation, and the use of inferred intentions to disambiguate reference.

scholarly journals The Role of Reward in Word Learning and Its Implications for Language Acquisition

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (21) ◽  
pp. 2606-2611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Ripollés ◽  
Josep Marco-Pallarés ◽  
Ulrike Hielscher ◽  
Anna Mestres-Missé ◽  
Claus Tempelmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Learning

scholarly journals Predicting the birth of a spoken word

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (41) ◽  
pp. 12663-12668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Roy ◽  
Michael C. Frank ◽  
Philip DeCamp ◽  
Matthew Miller ◽  
Deb Roy
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Learning Environment ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Multimodal Data ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Frequency Of Use

Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and video recordings of a single child’s life that allows us to measure the child’s experience of each word in his vocabulary. This corpus provides the first direct comparison, to our knowledge, between different predictors of the child’s production of individual words. We develop a series of new measures of the distinctiveness of the spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts in which a word appears, and show that these measures are stronger predictors of learning than frequency of use and that, unlike frequency, they play a consistent role across different syntactic categories. Our findings provide a concrete instantiation of classic ideas about the role of coherent activities in word learning and demonstrate the value of multimodal data in understanding children’s language acquisition.

scholarly journals Bilingual beginnings to learning words

2009 ◽  
Vol 364 (1536) ◽  
pp. 3649-3663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet F. Werker ◽  
Krista Byers-Heinlein ◽  
Christopher T. Fennell
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Speech Perception ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Language Discrimination ◽  
Infancy And Early Childhood

At the macrostructure level of language milestones, language acquisition follows a nearly identical course whether children grow up with one or with two languages. However, at the microstructure level, experimental research is revealing that the same proclivities and learning mechanisms that support language acquisition unfold somewhat differently in bilingual versus monolingual environments. This paper synthesizes recent findings in the area of early bilingualism by focusing on the question of how bilingual infants come to apply their phonetic sensitivities to word learning, as they must to learn minimal pair words (e.g. ‘cat’ and ‘mat’). To this end, the paper reviews antecedent achievements by bilinguals throughout infancy and early childhood in the following areas: language discrimination and separation, speech perception, phonetic and phonotactic development, word recognition, word learning and aspects of conceptual development that underlie word learning. Special consideration is given to the role of language dominance, and to the unique challenges to language acquisition posed by a bilingual environment.

scholarly journals Socially contingent responsivity: finding a link between statistical learning and understanding the referential nature of words

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Luchkina
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Statistical Learning ◽  
Word Learning

One of the central processes of language acquisition is word learning. While many species have been shown to learn word-object associations (e.g., Lyn & Savage-Rumbaugh, 2000; Kaminski, Call, & Fischer, 2004), humans understand the meanings of words and know that that words refer to certain objects, actions, or ideas, not merely recognize associative pairings. This paper explores the role of socially contingent responsivity in the development of the referential understanding of words.

scholarly journals Finding meaning in a noisy world: exploring the effects of referential ambiguity and competition on 2·5-year-olds’ cross-situational word learning

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 650-676 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN P. BUNCE ◽  
ROSE M. SCOTT
Keyword(s):  
Word Learning ◽  
High Probability ◽  
The Third ◽  
Fourth Trial ◽  
Finding Meaning ◽  
Novel Objects ◽  
Referential Ambiguity ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Situational Learning ◽  
Situational Information

AbstractWhile recent studies suggest children can use cross-situational information to learn words, these studies involved minimal referential ambiguity, and the cross-situational evidence overwhelmingly favored a single referent for each word. Here we asked whether 2·5-year-olds could identify a noun's referent when the scene and cross-situational evidence were more ambiguous. Children saw four trials in which a novel word occurred with four novel objects; only one object consistently co-occurred with the word across trials. The frequency of distracter objects varied across conditions. When all distracter referents occurred only once (no-competition), children successfully identified the noun's referent. When a high-probability competitor referent occurred on three trials, children identified the target referent if the competitor was absent on the third trial (short-competition) but not if it was present until the fourth trial (long-competition). This suggests that although 2·5-year-olds’ cross-situational learning scales up to more ambiguous scenes, it is disrupted by high-probability competitor referents.

Könyvismertetések

2007 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-265
Author(s):  
István Fekete ◽  
Mária Gósy ◽  
Rozália Eszter Ivády ◽  
Péter Kardos
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Perception And Action

DianePecherés RolfA. Zwaan(szerk.): Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking (Fekete István)     253 CsépeValéria: Az olvasó agy (Gósy Mária) 256 Kormos, Judit: Speech production and second language acquisition (Ivády Rozália Eszter)      260 MarosánGyörgy: Hogyan készül a történelem? (Kardos Péter) 263

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