Cross-situational word learning in the right situations.

Abstract

Upon hearing a novel word, language learners must identify its correct meaning from a diverse set of situationally relevant options. Such referential ambiguity could be reduced through repetitive exposure to the novel word across diverging learning situations, a learning mechanism referred to as cross-situational learning. Previous research has focused on the amount of information learners carry over from 1 learning instance to the next. In the present article, we investigate how context can modulate the learning strategy and its efficiency. Results from 4 cross-situational learning experiments with adults suggest the following: (a) Learners encode more than the specific hypotheses they form about the meaning of a word, providing evidence against the recent view referred to as single hypothesis testing. (b) Learning is faster when learning situations consistently contain members from a given group, regardless of whether this group is a semantically coherent group (e.g., animals) or induced through repetition (objects being presented together repetitively, just like a fork and a door may occur together repetitively in a kitchen). (c) Learners are subject to memory illusions, in a way that suggests that the learning situation itself appears to be encoded in memory during learning. Overall, our findings demonstrate that realistic contexts (such as the situation in which a given word has occurred; e.g., in the zoo or in the kitchen) help learners retrieve or discard potential referents for a word, because such contexts can be memorized and associated with a to-be-learned word.

Observational word learning: Beyond propose-but-verify and associative bean counting

“…Trueswell et al's (2013) choice of four foils made it likely that prior selections were repeated, leading them to potentially underestimate what people were learning from incorrect trials. Dautriche and Chemla (2014) decreased the number of foils, and found that people were now above chance in selecting the correct referent even after an incorrect previous encounter.…”

“…Others have proposed hybrid accounts: For example, there are memory-based accounts in which such inferences are made over stored episodes of situations in long-term memory (Dautriche & Chemla, 2014). Bayesian accounts take a hypothesis-testing approach, but evaluate multiple probabilistic hypotheses simultaneously to find the most likely mapping given the data (Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009).…”

“…Dautriche and Chemla (2014) pointed out that prior incorrect trials may function differently depending on the information on the current trial: If the prior incorrect selection is present, people may continue to select it and be below chance. Trueswell et al's (2013) choice of four foils made it likely that prior selections were repeated, leading them to potentially underestimate what people were learning from incorrect trials.…”

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

“…One possibility is that children's ability to cope with competition could depend on higher-order properties of the context in which that competition occurs. Recent cross-situational learning studies have shown that adults who encountered novel nouns in themed referential contexts where all of the objects were from the same category (e.g., animals, clothing, things in the kitchen) retained more information about the potential referents for each word across observations (Dautriche & Chemla, 2014) and demonstrated higher rates of word learning (Chen & Yu, 2015;Dautriche & Chemla, 2014) than did adults who encountered the same nouns in non-themed contexts involving unrelated objects. Moreover, the advantage of themed over non-themed contexts held even when the former involved greater competition between referents because individual distracter referents co-occurred more frequently with the target (Chen & Yu, 2015).…”

“…Recent evidence suggests that under at least some circumstances, both adults and children can use cross-situational information to identify the referents of new words (e.g., Akhtar & Montague, 1999;Childers, 2011;Childers & Paik, 2009;Dautriche & Chemla, 2014;Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999;Scott & Fisher, 2012;Smith, Smith, & Blythe, 2011;Smith & Yu, 2008;Yu & Smith, 2007, 2011. For instance, Smith and Yu (2008) presented 12-and 14-month-olds with a series of training trials in which pairs of novel objects were accompanied by two novel labels.…”