Actively Learning Object Names Across Ambiguous Situations

Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2012

Previous research shows that people can use the cooccurrence of words and objects in ambiguous situations (i.e., containing multiple words and objects) to learn word meanings during a brief passive training period . However, learners in the world are not completely passive, but can affect how their environment is structured by moving their heads, eyes, and even objects. These actions can indicate attention to a language teacher, who may then be more likely to name the attended objects. Using a novel active learning paradigm in which learners choose which four objects they would like to see named on each successive trial, this study asks whether active learning is superior to passive learning in a cross-situational word learning context. Finding that learners perform better in active learning, we investigate the strategies that were most successful, discuss the implications, and model the results.

2003

Three experiments provided evidence that 3.5-to 4-year-old English-speaking children (N 72) attend to the appearances of novel objects, not only when they hear a novel noun, but also when they hear a novel verb. Children learning nouns in the context of novel, moving objects attended exclusively to the appearances of objects, even though nouns were also related to the motions of those objects. Children learning verbs attended equally to the appearances of objects and their motions.

Four experiments (E1–E2–E3–E4) investigated whether different acquisition modalities lead to the emergence of differences typically found between concrete and abstract words, as argued by the words as tools (WAT) proposal. To mimic the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts, participants either manipulated novel objects or observed groups of objects interacting in novel ways (Training 1). In TEST 1 participants decided whether two elements belonged to the same category. Later they read the category labels (Training 2); labels could be accompanied by an explanation of their meaning. Then participants observed previously seen exemplars and other elements, and were asked which of them could be named with a given label (TEST 2). Across the experiments, it was more difficult to form abstract than concrete categories (TEST 1); even when adding labels, abstract words remained more difficult than concrete words (TEST 2). TEST 3 differed across the experiments. In E1 participants performed a feature production task. Crucially, the associations produced with the novel words reflected the pattern evoked by existing concrete and abstract words, as the first evoked more perceptual properties. In E2–E3–E4, TEST 3 consisted of a color verification task with manual/verbal (keyboard–microphone) responses. Results showed the microphone use to have an advantage over keyboard use for abstract words, especially in the explanation condition. This supports WAT: due to their acquisition modality, concrete words evoke more manual information; abstract words elicit more verbal information. This advantage was not present when linguistic information contrasted with perceptual one. Implications for theories and computational models of language grounding are discussed.

Child Development, 2001

A single, indirect exposure to a novel word provides information that could be used to make a fast mapping between the word and its referent, but it is not known how well this initial mapping specifies the function of the new word. The four studies reported here compare preschoolers' ( N ϭ 64) fast mapping of new proper and common names following an indirect exposure requiring inference with their learning of new names following ostension. In Study 1, 3-year-olds were shown an animate-inanimate pair of objects and asked to select, for example, Dax , a dax , or one. Children spontaneously selected an animate over an inanimate object as the referent for a novel proper name, but had no animacy preference in common name or baseline conditions. Next, the children were asked to perform actions on, for example, Dax or a dax , when presented with an array of three objects: the one they had just selected, another member of like kind, and a distracter. An indirectly learned proper name was treated as a marker for the originally selected object only, whereas a new common name was generalized to include the other category member. Study 2 showed that mappings made by inference were as robust as those made by ostension. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that even 2-year-olds can learn as much about the function of a new word from an indirect exposure as from ostension. . Ellen M. Markman is also at Stanford University.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2020

Developmental Psychology, 1992

In two experiments, adults and children were tested in an object-selection task that examined whether Ss would (a) map a novel word onto a previously unnamed object and (b) extend the newly learned word to another exemplar. Experiment 3 was a control study. Ss overwhelmingly selected the novel object as the referent for the novel term, even though the new label was never explicitly linked to the novel object. Ss also extended the new term and allowed it to preempt yet another novel label from applying to the just-named object. The existence of several lexical principles and the power of indirect word learning is supported.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2012

The current study examines how focusing children’s attention immediately after fast mapping improves their ability to retain novel names. Previous research suggests that young children can only retain novel names presented via referent selection if ostensive naming is provided and that such explicit naming works by increasing children’s attention to the target and decreasing their attention to the competitor objects (Horst and Samuelson, 2008). This explanation of the function of ostensive naming after referent selection trials was tested by drawing 24-month-old children’s attention to the target either by illuminating the target, covering the competitors, or both. A control group was given a social pragmatic cue (pointing). Children given social pragmatic cue support did not demonstrate retention. However, children demonstrated retention if the target object was illuminated, and also when it was illuminated and the competitors simultaneously dampened. This suggests that drawing children’s attention to the target object in a manner that helps focus children’s attention is critical for word learning via referent selection. Directing attention away from competitors while also directing attention toward a target also aids in the retention of novel words.

Journal of Memory and Language, 2011

The present study explored when and how the top-down intention to speak influences the language production process. We did so by comparing the brain's electrical response for a variable known to affect lexical access, namely word frequency, during overt object naming and non-verbal object categorization. We found that during naming, the event-related brain potentials elicited for objects with low frequency names started to diverge from those with high frequency names as early as 152 ms after stimulus onset, while during non-verbal categorization the same frequency comparison appeared 200 ms later eliciting a qualitatively different brain response. Thus, only when participants had the conscious intention to name an object the brain rapidly engaged in lexical access. The data offer evidence that top-down intention to speak proactively facilitates the activation of words related to perceived objects.

Child Development, 1984

The linguistic form class of a word and the kind of object the word refers to both provide information for discovering whether a new noun refers to an object as a category member (e.g., a dog) or as an individual (e.g., Lassie). This study investigated children's use of both syntactic (i.e., form class) and semantic (i.e., type of referent) information, clarifying and extending work summarized by Macnamara. Although widely accepted, past results were inconclusive because (1)children were taught new words for objects they could already name, and (2) the earlier procedure lacked appropriate distractor items. This work eliminated these problems by using unfamiliar objects and a revised testing procedure. 32 2-year-olds were each taught 1 new noun. Linguistic form class (presence or absence of an article) and type of referent (animal-like or blocklike toy) were varied between groups. Children's interpretations of the new nouns were assessed by asking the subjects to select the named toy from an array of 4 toys (e.g., "Point to Zav"). With animal-like toys, Macnamara's claim that children interpret common nouns as category names, and proper nouns as individual names, was supported. With blocklike toys, children in our study interpreted a common noun as a category name, but there was a tendency for children in the proper noun condition to choose a particular stuffed animal as the new noun's referent rather than the named blocklike toy. These results show that 2-year-old children use both linguistic form class and their knowledge about real-world objects to interpret new words.

Plos One

While embodied approaches of cognition have proved to be successful in explaining concrete concepts and words, they have more difficulties in accounting for abstract concepts and words, and several proposals have been put forward. This work aims to test the Words As Tools proposal, according to which both abstract and concrete concepts are grounded in perception, action and emotional systems, but linguistic information is more important for abstract than for concrete concept representation, due to the different ways they are acquired: while for the acquisition of the latter linguistic information might play a role, for the acquisition of the former it is instead crucial. We investigated the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts and words, and verified its impact on conceptual representation. In Experiment 1, participants explored and categorized novel concrete and abstract entities, and were taught a novel label for each category. Later they performed a categorical recognition task and an image-word matching task to verify a) whether and how the introduction of language changed the previously formed categories, b) whether language had a major weight for abstract than for concrete words representation, and c) whether this difference had consequences on bodily responses. The results confirm that, even though both concrete and abstract concepts are grounded, language facilitates the acquisition of the latter and plays a major role in their representation, resulting in faster responses with the mouth, typically associated with language production. Experiment 2 was a rating test aiming to verify whether the findings of Experiment 1 were simply due to heterogeneity, i.e. to the fact that the members of abstract categories were more heterogeneous than those of concrete categories. The results confirmed the effectiveness of our operationalization, showing that abstract concepts are more associated with the mouth and concrete ones with the hand, independently from heterogeneity. Abstract