Week 3 Lecture 3 - Word learning Flashcards
What is the mapping problem? (Quine, 1960)
issue of getting the meaning of a word right
may under-extend or over-extend the word use
Which comes first: comprehension or production?
comprehension
How many more words do 2 yo comprehend compared to produce?
2-3x more
at what age do infants start to comprehend nouns?
6mns
At what age do infants start to comprehend verbs?
10 mns
when do infants get faster at the looking-while-listening task?
18-24 mns
don’t even need to hear the full word at 18 mns
at what age do infants tend to say their first words?
12 mns
at 24-30 mns, how many words can an infant produce?
500 words (however, lots of variability)
What types of words are and aren’t produced in first words?
Are: nouns, verbs, social routines (e.g., bye, hello), adjectives
Aren’t: articles (e.g., a, the)
What is the early noun bias?
cross-linguistically, there is a predominance of nouns in early vocab
What is the natural partitions hypothesis? (Gentner, 1982)
- Early nouns denote concrete objects easily individuated from surroundings
- Actions, states etc. tend to apply TO entities labelled by nouns, less clearly defined in space & time
What is socially mediated word learning? (Tomasello, 2003)
- Not all early words are nouns (hello, bye)
- Not all early nouns are discrete objects (breakfast)
- Learning occurs in situations where easiest to read adult’s intentions, irrespective of word class
- Happens often with nouns
What is under-extension?
- word used only in specific context or specific exemplar
- words used in specific contexts where adults would use in a wide range of contexts
What is over-extension?
word used beyond its true meaning
happens frequently
What are 4 innate constraints on early word learning?
- object constraint
- whole-object constraint
- principle of contrast
- mutual exclusivity
What is object constraint?
Words refer to objects
Explains early noun bias
What is whole-object constraint?
Words refer to whole objects rather than their parts
Gavagai = whole animal, not tail, ears, legs
What is the principle of contrast?
No two words have exactly the same meaning
Explains how the child overcomes overextension
What is mutual exclusivity?
No object has more than one name
Helps children override the ‘whole object constraint’ and learn the names for parts of objects.
What are some problems with constraint theories?
Do constraints explain word learning or just describe it?
Are constraints innate or learned via experience?
Are constraints specific to language? .
What is the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis?
proposes that children learn word meanings by recognizing syntactic categories (such as nouns, adjectives, etc.) and the structure of their language
What did Gelman and Markman find?
4yrolds pick different object of same kind when asked to find the fep one , but a different object when asked to find the fep
Shows difference between word categories with “fep one” suggesting an adjective but “the fep” suggesting a noun
Waxman and Booth (2001) looked at how 14 mns extend novel nouns and adjectives
What did they find?
With nouns, children extend the noun to the category but not the property
With adjectives, children do not extend to the category or the property
True or false?
Structural cues to nouns seemed to be learned early, but structural cues to other words appear later
true
