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.

Children change in their word-learning abilities sometime during the second year of life. The nature of this behavioral change has been taken to suggest an underlying change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more purely symbolic form of learning. We present a simple associative computational model that accounts for these developmental shifts without any underlying change in mechanism. Thus, there may be no need to posit a qualitative mechanistic change in the word-learning of young children. More generally, words, as symbols, may emerge from associative beginnings. Overview Word-learning is likely to rely heavily on associative learning, such that the child comes to associate the sound "dog" with dogs, the sound "cat" with cats, and so on. However, children's word-learning abilities change significantly during the second year of life, and some have proposed that this behavioral change reflects an underlying mechanistic shift away from a purely associative base. I...

This book is about the interface between natural language and the sensorimotor system. It is obvious that there is an interface between language and sensorimotor cognition, because we can talk about what we see and do. The main proposal in the book is that the interface is more direct than is commonly assumed. To argue for this proposal I focus on a simple concrete episode—a man grabbing a cup—which can be reported in a simple transitive sentence (e.g. the English sentence The man grabbed a cup). In the first part of the book I present a detailed model of the sensorimotor processes involved in experiencing this episode, both as the agent bringing it about and as an observer watching it happen. The model draws on a large body of research in neuroscience and psychology. I also present a model of the syntactic structure of the associated transitive sentence, developed within the entirely separate discipline of theoretical linguistics. This latter model is a version of Chomsky’s ‘Minimalist ’ syntactic theory, which assumes that a sentence reporting the episode has the same underlying syntactic structure (called ‘logical form’) regardless of which language it is in. My main proposal is that these two independently motivated models are in fact closely

University Press

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

While there is ample evidence that children treat words as mutually exclusive, the cognitive basis of this bias is widely debated. We focus on the distinction between pragmatic and lexical constraints accounts. High-functioning children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) offer a unique perspective on this debate, as they acquire substantial vocabularies despite impoverished social-pragmatic skills. We tested children and adolescents with ASD in a paradigm examining mutual exclusivity for words and facts. Words were interpreted contrastively more often than facts. Word performance was associated with vocabulary size; fact performance was associated with social-communication skills. Thus mutual exclusivity does not appear to be driven by pragmatics, suggesting that it is either a lexical constraint or a reflection of domain-general learning processes.

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

One-year-olds comprehend the communicative intentions

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

Previous research has found that young children recognize an adult as being acquainted with an object most readily when the child and adult have previously engaged socially with that object together. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that such social engagement is so powerful that it can sometimes lead children to overestimate what has been shared. After having shared two objects with an adult in turn, 2-year-old children played with a third object the adult could not see. In three out of four conditions, the adult remained co-present and ⁄ or communicated to the child while she played with the third object. Children falsely perceived the adult as being acquainted with the third object when she remained co-present (whether or not she also communicated) but not when she clearly terminated the interaction by disengaging and leaving. These results suggest that when young children are engaged with a co-present person they tend to overestimate the other’s knowledge. For humans to interact appropriately with each other and arrive at some mutual understanding, they need to know what others perceive and know. Developmental research indicates that even infants possess some understanding in both of these domains. They begin to understand some basic things about seeing in the first half year of their lives, when they turn their head in the same direction another person has just looked (D’Entremont,