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The Emergence of Words
Terry Regier (regier@psych.uchicago.edu)
Bryce Corrigan (b­corrigan@uchicago.edu)
Rachael Cabasaan (rrcabasa@uchicago.edu)
Amanda Woodward (alw1@psych.uchicago.edu)
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago
Chicago, IL 60637 USA
Michael Gasser (gasser@indiana.edu)
Linda Smith (smith4@indiana.edu)
Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405 USA

Abstract Children change in their word­learning abilities sometime during the second year of life. The nature of this be­ havioral 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 qual­ itative mechanistic change in the word­learning of young children. More generally, words, as symbols, may emerge from associative beginnings. Overview Word­learning 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 word­learning abilities change sig­ nificantly during the second year of life, and some have proposed that this behavioral change reflects an under­ lying mechanistic shift away from a purely associative base. In particular, it has been proposed that sometime during the child's second year, a conceptual insight into the symbolic, referential nature of words occurs (Mc­ Shane, 1979). This insight then supports a more purely symbolic form of learning, in contrast with the simple associative learning that preceded it. A number of changes in word­learning occur at around this age. When viewed as a totality, this array of behav­ ioral changes does suggest a mechanistic change of some sort. We shall argue, however, that these changes may be accounted for without recourse to any posited conceptual ...

@inproceedings{regier01theEmergence,
  author={T. Regier and B. Corrigan and C. Cabasaan and A. Woodward and M. Gasser and L. Smith},
  title={The emergence of words},
  year={2001},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/regier01theEmergence.html}
}

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