Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Second, in contrast to adults, children in similar listening studies fail to use this referential information and appear to rely exclusively on verb biases or perhaps syntactically based parsing principles (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999). We explore these contrasts by fully crossing verb bias and referential manipulations in a study using the eye-gaze listening technique with adults (Experiment 1) and Wve-year-olds (Experiment 2). Results indicate that adults combine lexical and referential information to determine syntactic choice. Children rely A portion of this work was presented in proceedings to the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. The ideas in this paper owe much to our conversations with Lila Gleitman and to the comments of the many audiences who heard preliminary reports of this research. We thank Kirsten Thorpe for her assistance with testing, coding, and participant recruitment and Sylvia Yuan for her assistance in data analysis. We also gratefully acknowledge Tracy Dardick who carried out the norming studies and Jared Novick and David January who assisted in comparisons between head-mounted eye-tracking and our procedure. This work was supported by NIH Grant 1-R01-HD37507 to the second author and a National Science Foundation Science and Technology grant to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania (NSF-STC Coo...

We present a computational model that uses intention recognition as a basis for situated word learning. In an initial experiment, the model acquired a lexicon from situated natural language collected from human participants interacting in a virtual game environment. Similar to child language learning, the model learns nouns faster than verbs.

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How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words like know harder for learners to acquire than words like dog or jump? We suggest that a considerable part of the difficulty of acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. We sketch a theory of word learning that considers acquisition of the lexicon and of the clause-level syntax to be interlocked throughout their course, rather than distinct and separable parts of language learning. The machinery is set in motion by word-toworld pairing, a procedure that efficiently solves the mapping problem for a stock of concrete lexical items (mostly nouns), but only these. Armed with this basic stock of items, the learner accomplishes further lexical knowledge by an arm-over-arm process in which successively more sophisticated representations of linguistic structure are built. Lexical learning thereby can proceed by adding structure-to-world mapping to the earlier-available machinery. These further linguistic developments enable efficient solution of the mapping problem for the more abstract component of the lexical stock.. The outcome of this procedure is a highly lexicalized grammar whose usefulness does not end with successful learning. Rather, these detailed and highly structured lexical representations serve the purposes of the incremental multiple-cue processing machinery by which people produce speech and parse the speech that they hear.

Languages vary in how they encode motion events. For example, English motion verbs often encode the manner of the motion while Spanish motion verbs encode the path.

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Recent studies show that both adults and young children possess powerful statistical learning capabilities to solve the wordto-world mapping problem. However, the underlying mechanisms that make statistical learning possible and powerful are not yet known. With the goal of providing new insights into this issue, the research reported in this paper used an eye tracker to record the moment-by-moment eye movement data of 14-month-old babies in statistical learning tasks. Various measures are applied to such fine-grained temporal data, such as looking duration and shift rate (the number of shifts in gaze from one visual object to the other) trial by trial, showing different eye movement patterns between strong and weak statistical learners. Moreover, an information-theoretic measure is developed and applied to gaze data to quantify the degree of learning uncertainty trial by trial. Next, a simple associative statistical learning model is applied to eye movement data and these simulation results are compared with empirical results from young children, showing strong correlations between these two. This suggests that an associative learning mechanism with selective attention can provide a cognitively plausible model of cross-situational statistical learning. The work represents the first steps in using eye movement data to infer underlying real-time processes in statistical word learning.

There are an infinite number of possible word-to-world pairings in naturalistic learning environments. Previous proposals to solve this mapping problem focus on linguistic, social, representational constraints at a single moment. This paper investigates a cross-situational learning strategy based on computing distributional statistics across words, across referents, and most importantly across the co-occurrences of these two at multiple moments. We briefly exposed adults to a set of trials containing multiple spoken words and multiple pictures of individual objects with no information about wordpicture correspondences within a trial. Nonetheless, subjects learned over trials the word-picture mappings through crosstrial statistical relations. Different learning conditions compared the degree of within-trial reference uncertainty, the number of trials and the length of trials. We also propose and implement a computational model and feed it with the same training data used in different learning conditions in experimental studies, to shed light on the possible underlying mechanism of statistical learning. Overall, these results suggest that statistical cross-situational learning may be one of fundamental mechanisms to tackle the word-to-world mapping problem.

Language development is characterized by predictable shifts in the words that children learn and the complexity of their utterances. But language development typically occurs simultaneously with cognitive development and maturation, making it difficult to determine the causes of these shifts. We explored how acquisition precedes in the absence of possible cognitive or maturational roadblocks, by examining the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted preschoolers. Like infants these children acquire a language from child-directed speech in the home, but they are older and more cognitively sophisticated. We collected parental reports (CDI-2) and speech samples from 14 preschoolers, 3 to 18 months after they were adopted from China. These children made rapid progress in acquiring English and showed the same developmental patterns as monolingual infants (matched for vocabulary size). Early on, their vocabularies were dominated by nouns, their utterances were short, and function morphemes were almost entirely absent. Children at later stages of development had more diverse lexicons and produced longer utterances with more closed-class morphemes. Keywords: language development, international adoption, word learning, syntax, language production, nouns, verbs Language development is marked by a series a qualitative shifts. Infants speak in singleword utterances for several months before beginning to combine words. Young children learn a disproportionate number of nouns before acquiring a balanced complement of verbs, adjectives and prepositions. Young English speakers typically omit function morphemes from their early word combinations, and then gradually begin to add them in. A central question in language acquisition is what causes children to move through these phas...

Early language development is characterized by predictable changes in the words children produce and the complexity of their utterances. In infants these changes could reflect increasing linguistic expertise or cognitive maturation and development. To disentangle these factors, we compared the acquisition of English in internationallyadopted preschoolers and internationally-adopted infants. Parental reports and speech samples were collected for one year. Both groups showed the qualitative shifts that characterize first-language acquisition. Initially, they produced single-word utterances consisting mostly of nouns and social words. The appearance of verbs, adjectives and multi-word utterances was predicted by vocabulary size in both groups. Preschoolers did learn some words at an earlier stage than infants, specifically words referring to the past or future and adjectives describing behavior and internal states. These findings suggest that cognitive development plays little role in the shift from referential terms to predicates but may constrain children’s ability to learn some abstract words.