Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics

Abstract

First word learning should be difficult because any pairing of a word and scene presents the learner with an infinite number of possible referents. Accordingly, theorists of children's rapid word learning have sought constraints on word-referent mappings. These constraints are thought to work by enabling learners to resolve the ambiguity inherent in any labeled scene to determine the speaker's intended referent at that moment. The present study shows that 12-and 14-month-old infants can resolve the uncertainty problem in another way, not by unambiguously deciding the referent in a single word-scene pairing, but by rapidly evaluating the statistical evidence across many individually ambiguous words and scenes.

Parallel interactive retrieval of item and associative information from event memory

“…Over time, the ability to store and retrieve information about the co-occurrence of events underlies the learning of a great deal of semantic information, such as word learning (co-occurrence of words and referents; Smith & Yu, 2008;Smith et al, 2014), causal learning (Zacks & Tversky, 2001), and learning whole object representations (Czerwinski et al, 1992;Gauthier & Tarr, 1997;Shiffrin & Lightfoot, 1997;Nelson & Shiffrin, 2013). In a broad sense, most memory begins as "associative" in that events and objects are collections of isolated entities.…”

Do as I say, not as I do: A lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition

“…One broad approach derives from the view that semantic knowledge is learned from cross-situational regularities between linguistic forms and observed events (St Augustine, 397/2001;Pinker, 1994;Smith & Yu, 2008). On this situational account, locative verb classes are learned from the non-linguistic features of the situations in which locative verbs are heard.…”

“…The Concept layer was connected to the Produced Word layer by weights which the model learned gradually through crosssituational learning (Smith & Yu, 2008). The Hidden layer was connected to the Role layer to enable the model to learn to activate roles at particular positions in sentences.…”

Learned Labels Shape Pre‐speech Infants’ Object Representations

“…The first indications of these links appear before the onset of speech: infants as young as six months can correctly identify the referents of frequently heard words (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012; see also Delle Luche, Floccia, Granjon, & Nazzi, 2016). These early label‐object associations are strengthened incrementally over the long‐term via cross‐situational learning (Smith & Yu, 2008), in which repeated encounters of label‐object co‐occurrences in a variety of contexts eventually lead to long‐term word learning.…”