Abstract:
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...
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