Social Inference May Guide Early Lexical Learning

Abstract

We incorporate social reasoning about groups of informants into a model of word learning, and show that the model accounts for infant looking behavior in tasks of both word learning and recognition. Simulation 1 models an experiment where 16-month-old infants saw familiar objects labeled either correctly or incorrectly, by either adults or audio talkers. Simulation 2 reinterprets puzzling data from the Switch task, an audiovisual habituation procedure wherein infants are tested on familiarized associations between novel objects and labels. Eight-month-olds outperform 14-month-olds on the Switch task when required to distinguish labels that are minimal pairs (e.g., “buk” and “puk”), but 14-month-olds' performance is improved by habituation stimuli featuring multiple talkers. Our modeling results support the hypothesis that beliefs about knowledgeability and group membership guide infant looking behavior in both tasks. These results show that social and linguistic development interact in non-trivial ways, and that social categorization findings in developmental psychology could have substantial implications for understanding linguistic development in realistic settings where talkers vary according to observable features correlated with social groupings, including linguistic, ethnic, and gendered groups.

Do Infants Really Learn Phonetic Categories?

“…A complete model would also need to incorporate social factors(Conboy et al, 2015;Kuhl et al, 2003;Lytle et al, 2018;Tripp et al, 2021).…”

Subsegmental representation in child speech production: structured variability of stop consonant voice onset time in American English and Cantonese

“…If the child tracked the [t h ] VOTs from talker A and the [k h ] VOTs from talker B, consistency in the between-category structure would be unlikely to arise given the considerable cross-talker variability in overall VOT values. Social sensitivity to the source of the content has indeed been proposed for handling multi-talker input for child speech perception, so such talker-specific tracking of VOT is not improbable (Tripp, Feldman, & Idsardi, 2021). Indeed, how multi-talker input might affect any emergent representations of this feature is open for debate.…”