Not Only Size Matters: Early‐Talker and Late‐Talker Vocabularies Support Different Word‐Learning Biases in Babies and Networks
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: In typical development, word learning goes from slow and laborious to fast and seemingly effortless. Typically developing 2-year-olds seem to intuit the whole range of things in a category from hearing a single instance named-they have word-learning biases. This is not the case for children with relatively small vocabularies (late talkers). We present a computational model that accounts for the emergence of word-learning biases in children at both ends of the vocabulary spectrum based solely on vocabulary structure. The results of Experiment 1 show that late-talkers' and early-talkers' noun vocabularies have different structures and that neural networks trained on the vocabularies of individual late talkers acquire different word-learning biases than those trained on early-talker vocabularies. These models make novel predictions about the word-learning biases in these two populations. Experiment 2 tests these predictions on late- and early-talking toddlers in a novel noun generalization task.
Source: Cognitive Science
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12409
Authors: Eliana Colunga, Clare E. Sims
Institution: University of Colorado Boulder
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2550948129