Premium
Statistical word learning at scale: the baby's view is better
Author(s) -
Yurovsky Daniel,
Smith Linda B.,
Yu Chen
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/desc.12036
Subject(s) - psychology , ambiguity , perspective (graphical) , cognitive psychology , situational ethics , language acquisition , embodied cognition , natural language , natural (archaeology) , word learning , event (particle physics) , cognitive science , artificial intelligence , linguistics , social psychology , computer science , mathematics education , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , vocabulary , archaeology , history
A key question in early word learning is how children cope with the uncertainty in natural naming events. One potential mechanism for uncertainty reduction is cross‐situational word learning – tracking word/object co‐occurrence statistics across naming events. But empirical and computational analyses of cross‐situational learning have made strong assumptions about the nature of naming event ambiguity, assumptions that have been challenged by recent analyses of natural naming events. This paper shows that learning from ambiguous natural naming events depends on perspective. Natural naming events from parent–child interactions were recorded from both a third‐person tripod‐mounted camera and from a head‐mounted camera that produced a ‘child's‐eye’ view. Following the human simulation paradigm, adults were asked to learn artificial language labels by integrating across the most ambiguous of these naming events. Significant learning was found only from the child's perspective, pointing to the importance of considering statistical learning from an embodied perspective.