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https://hdl.handle.net/2440/132654
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Type: | Journal article |
Title: | Cross-situational learning in a Zipfian environment |
Author: | Hendrickson, A.T. Perfors, A. |
Citation: | Cognition, 2019; 189:11-22 |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Issue Date: | 2019 |
ISSN: | 0010-0277 1873-7838 |
Statement of Responsibility: | Andrew T. Hendricksona, Amy Perfors |
Abstract: | Both adults and children have shown impressive cross-situational word learning in which they leverage the statistics of word usage across many different scenes in order to isolate specific word meanings (e.g., Yu & Smith, 2007). However, relatively little is known about how this learning scales to real language. Some theoretical analyses suggest that when words follow a Zipfian distribution, as they do in natural language, it should be more difficult to learn a lexicon because of the many low-frequency words that are only observed a few times (Blythe, Smith, & Smith, 2010; Vogt, 2012). Although this effect can be mitigated somewhat by assuming mutual exclusivity (Reisenauer, Smith, & Blythe, 2013), no mathematical analyses suggest that learning in a Zipfian environment should be easier. In this work, we show the opposite of the predicted effect using cross-situational learning experiments with adults: when the distribution of words and meanings is Zipfian, learning is not impaired and is usually improved. Over a series of experiments, we provide evidence that this is because Zipfian distributions help people to disambiguate the meanings of the other words in the situation. |
Keywords: | Cross-situational statistical learning Language learning Zipfian distributions |
Rights: | © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.03.005 |
Grant ID: | http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP110104949 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP1801036 |
Published version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.03.005 |
Appears in Collections: | Psychology publications |
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