A Single Word in a Population of Words

Abstract

Carey and Bartlett introduced a new method for studying lexical development, one of presenting the child with a word and a single context of use and asking what was learned from that one encounter. They also reported a then new finding: By using what they already knew about previously learned words, young children could narrow the range of possibilities for likely meanings in a single encounter. This papers honors that original contribution and the robust literature and set of phenomena it generated by considering how newly learned categories must fit into a population of already learned categories. This paper presents an overview of Packing Theory, a formal geometrical analysis of how local interactions in a large population of categories create a global structure of feature relevance such that near categories in the population of have similar generalization patterns. The implications of these ideas for learning from a single encounter, their relation to the evidence of artificial word learning studies, and new predictions are discussed.

Linguistic and Cultural Variation in Early Color Word Learning

“…Although this may, in part, be due to environmental factors that promote the usage of color words with young children, such as a focus on color terms by the parents or an increase in colored plastic toys around the home, it is more likely reflective of a difference in measurement sensitivity. Parents are very sensitive to infants understanding and production of specific words (Hidaka & Smith, 2010) and have the opportunity to see them comprehend and produce words in a variety of contexts. In contrast, an early comprehension of color words is much harder to assess, unless explicitly tested, and the contexts in which they are used are far more limited, so the earliest point of comprehension of color terms is much more difficult to ascertain (Ramscar, Thorpe, & Denny, 2007).…”

An integrative account of constraints on cross-situational learning

“…cup ) appear to follow an extended developmental trajectory, changing well into young-adulthood (Ameel et al, 2008). This representational change is likely related to variability in the exemplars children are exposed to, variability in the contexts in which they are seen, and to the other words children have learned and the kinds of hypotheses they have entertained (Hidaka & Smith, 2010; Dautriche & Chemla, 2014). Thus, a full understanding of the processes of early word learning will necessarily require further analyses of the natural ecology of word learning and how it changes across development.…”

The role of partial knowledge in statistical word learning

“…Johnson, Frank, Demuth, and Jones (2010) similarly showed that joint inference of words and syllables produces better speech segmentation than does inference over syllables alone. Hidaka and Smith (2010) showed that learning the features relevant for multiple natural language categories allows rapid acquisition of new categories and may help to explain fast-mapping. Because language contains structure at multiple levels and regularities are related across levels, learning something about one level is informative about aspects at other levels.…”

“…Similarly, although objects that receive a given label are not identical, they typically vary along predictable dimensions (Hidaka & Smith, 2010). Thus, even though L.…”