TY - JOUR

T1 - Gavagai is as Gavagai does

T2 - learning nouns and verbs from cross-situational statistics

AU - Monaghan, Padraic

AU - Mattock, Karen

AU - Davies, Robert A. I.

AU - Smith, Alastair C.

N1 - This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Monaghan, P., Mattock, K., Davies, R. A. I. and Smith, A. C. (2015), Gavagai Is as Gavagai Does: Learning Nouns and Verbs From Cross-Situational Statistics. Cognitive Science, 39: 1099–1112. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12186 which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cogs.12186/abstract This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.

PY - 2015/7

Y1 - 2015/7

N2 - Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross-situational learning studies have shown that word-object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either nouns or verbs in ambiguous contexts and thus bypass much of the complexity of multiple grammatical categories in speech. We show that noun word learning in adults is robust when objects are moving, and that verbs can also be learned from similar scenes without additional syntactic information. Furthermore, we show that both nouns and verbs can be acquired simultaneously, thus resolving category-level as well as individual word-level ambiguity. However, nouns were learned more quickly than verbs, and we discuss this in light of previous studies investigating the noun advantage in word learning.

AB - Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross-situational learning studies have shown that word-object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either nouns or verbs in ambiguous contexts and thus bypass much of the complexity of multiple grammatical categories in speech. We show that noun word learning in adults is robust when objects are moving, and that verbs can also be learned from similar scenes without additional syntactic information. Furthermore, we show that both nouns and verbs can be acquired simultaneously, thus resolving category-level as well as individual word-level ambiguity. However, nouns were learned more quickly than verbs, and we discuss this in light of previous studies investigating the noun advantage in word learning.

KW - Language acquisition

KW - Cross-situational learning

KW - Noun learning

KW - Verb learning

KW - Symbol grounding

KW - WORD-REFERENT MAPPINGS

KW - SPEAKING CHILDREN

KW - ENGLISH-SPEAKING

KW - LANGUAGE

KW - VOCABULARY

KW - ATTENTION

KW - CONSTRAINTS

KW - UNCERTAINTY

KW - ACQUISITION

KW - HYPOTHESIS

U2 - 10.1111/cogs.12186

DO - 10.1111/cogs.12186

M3 - Journal article

VL - 39

SP - 1099

EP - 1112

JO - Cognitive Science

JF - Cognitive Science

SN - 0364-0213

IS - 5

ER -