The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 24 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Rapid Word Learning Under Uncertainty via Cross-Situational Statistics
Abstract
There are an infinite number of possible word-to-word pairings in naturalistic learning environments. Previous proposals to solve this mapping problem have focused on linguistic, social, representational, and attentional constraints at a single moment. This article discusses a cross-situational learning strategy based on computing distributional statistics across words, across referents, and, most important, across the co-occurrences of words and referents at multiple moments. We briefly exposed adults to a set of trials that each contained multiple spoken words and multiple pictures of individual objects; no information about word-picture correspondences was given within a trial. Nonetheless, over trials, subjects learned the word-picture mappings through cross-trial statistical relations. Different learning conditions varied the degree of within-trial reference uncertainty, the number of trials, and the length of trials. Overall, the remarkable performance of learners in various learning conditions suggests that they calculate cross-trial statistics with sufficient fidelity and by doing so rapidly learn word-referent pairs even in highly ambiguous learning contexts.
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Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics
Smith, L., & Yu, C. (2008) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.06.010 · Cited by 989
Self-citationStatistical learning and language acquisition
Romberg, A. R., & Saffran, J. R. (2010) · WIREs Cognitive Science · doi:10.1002/wcs.78 · Cited by 517
Embodied attention and word learning by toddlers
Yu, C., & Smith, L. B. (2012) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.06.016 · Cited by 502
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Metadata
- Authors
- Yu, C., & Smith, L. B.
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2007-05
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 414-420
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W2166571083
- Cited by
- 655
- References
- 24
- FWCI
- 37.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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