Fast mapping word meanings across trials: Young children forget all but their first guess

Language design and communicative competence: The minimalist perspective

“…Yet, while joint attention certainly plays its part, other research by Medina et al (2011) suggests that during word learning comprehenders implement a learning procedure in which only a single meaning is hypothesized and retained across learning instances, unless disconfirmed. Medina et al's (2011) results suggest that neither alternative hypothesized meanings nor details of past learning situations were retained, suggesting that while joint attention can certainly direct aspects of learning, learners nevertheless appear to use a one-trial "fast-mapping" procedure, even under conditions of referential uncertainty (Markman 1990;Aravind et al 2018). In addition, as Reboul (2015) discusses, mind-reading relies on metarepresentations generated by a recursive syntax (e.g.…”

Bilingual and Monolingual First Language Acquisition Experience Differentially Shapes Children’s Property Term Learning: Evidence from Behavioral and Neurophysiological Measures

“…However, at the age of five, the bilinguals’ novel noun interpretations (scoring at chance level) followed mutual exclusivity assumptions less often than the monolinguals’. Four-year-old bilingual and monolingual children’s differences in MEC-based object choices fell between the ones measured at three and five years of age [50]. A similar developmental trajectory was found for MEC use in three- and four-year-old versus five- and six-year-old bilingual and monolingual children [51,52].…”

“…When mapping of the novel label onto the familiar object was cued, the bilingual but not the monolingual children performed above chance, showing that bilinguals were more willing to accept second labels than monolinguals. Developmental differences between three-, four-, and five-year-olds have been found for the learning of novel nouns in a complex disambiguation paradigm (on top of a forced-choice task children had to process information about the colors of the presented objects) [50]. At the age of three, ‘simultaneous bilingual’ children (who were judged “dual language learners” by schools and parents; it is not clear whether these children all experienced bilingual input from birth) were comparable to monolingual learners in the extent to which they exploited the MEC.…”

“…In most of the studies on bilingual preschoolers aged three and older reviewed above, it is unclear whether the entire bilingual sample experienced bilingual input from birth. We focused only on studies where such an inclusion criterion was given [49] or very likely [4,38,47,50,51,52,53]. The latter studies may have included both children with bilingual input from birth (who have been used to hearing two labels for an object from the beginning) and early sequential bilingual children, who started off as monolinguals, hearing mainly one-on-one mappings.…”

How to Make the Most out of Very Little

“…The meaning of a word is the candidate with the strongest statistical correlation over all learning instances. By contrast, a local approach (Aravind et al., ; Medina et al., ; Stevens et al., ; Trueswell, Medina, Hafri, & Gleitman, ) attempts to resolve ambiguity in the moment. Specifically, it ignores all potential words meanings that do not serve to confirm or disconfirm a word's hypothesized interpretation.…”