We examine the influence of inferring interlocutors' referential intentions from their body movements at the early stage of lexical acquisition. By testing human subjects and comparing their performances in different learning conditions, we find that those embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word-meaning association.

Abstract not found

Previous work on early language acquisition has shown that word meanings can be acquired by an associative procedure that maps perceptual experience onto linguistic labels based on cross-situational observation. A new trend termed social-pragmatic theory [27] focuses on the effect of the child’s social-cognitive capacities, such as joint attention and intention reading. In this paper, we argue that statistical and social cues can be seamlessly integrated to facilitate early word learning. To support this idea, we first introduce a statistical learning mechanism that provides a formal account of cross-situational observation. The main part of this paper then presents a unified model that is able to make use of different kinds of social cues, such as joint attention and prosody in maternal speech, in the statistical learning framework. In a computational analysis of infant data, we report the quantitative results of our unified model in computing word-meaning associations, which outperforms the purely statistical learning method. 1

Previous research suggested that eye gaze as a social cue plays a crucial role in early word learning. In light of this, we investigated another kind of embodied social cue, pointing, and asked how it relates to word learning in young children as it is ubiquitous in day – to – day parent- child interactions. Parents were asked to narrate a story book displayed on a computer screen. Each page of the story contains the pictures of multiple objects and the novel spoken names of those objects were introduced during the narration. Word learning was measured at the end of the story. The three learning conditions were, (1) pointing to the correct object while labeling it, (2) no pointing, and (3) general pointing to the center of the screen but not to a specific object. The results showed embodied pointing actions significantly increase word learning. Moreover, a touch screen panel placed over the computer screen was used to record the time and location of each pointing action. We developed and implemented various approaches to measure the spatial and temporal correlations of parental speech and pointing actions. The results of detailed analyses suggest that exact synchrony and degree of overlap of speech and pointing streams of action are not directly relevant to learning efficiency. Overall, this work suggests both that social cues, such as pointing, are embedded in a system of correlations relating the speech stream to the physical world of objects and events and that the human word-learning system is robust. Index Terms: word learning, social cues, language learning, and intermodal synchrony

Researchers have long been interested in how young children learn new words in ambiguous contexts. The present study examined a theory of mind perspective by investigating the hypothesis that very young children can use speaker cues of familiarity in order to disambiguate a word learning situation. The participants were 40 toddlers ranging in age from 2.5 to 4.0 years of age. All children participated in an original word learning task designed to measure toddlers ' ability to use the cue of speaker familiarity in order to determine the referent of a novel word differentially based on the lexical class of that novel word. The findings suggest that toddlers as young as two-and-a-half are able to make use of this cue and can apply the information derived from this cue differentially based on the lexical class of the novel word. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

A unified model of early word learning: Integrating statistical and social cues