69 research outputs found
Subjective confidence influences word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task
International audienceLearning is often accompanied by a subjective sense of confidence in oneâs knowledge, a feeling of knowing what you know and how well you know it. Subjective confidence has been shown to guide learning in other domains, but has received little attention so far in the word learning literature. Across three word learning experiments, we investigated whether and how a sense of confidence in having acquired a word meaning influences the word learning process itself. First, we show evidence for a confirmation bias during word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task: Learners who are highly confident they know the meaning of a word are more likely to persist in their belief than learners who are not, even after observing objective evidence disconfirming their belief. Second, we show that subjective confidence in a word meaning modulates inferential processes based on that word, affecting learning over the whole lexicon: Learners who hold high confidence in a word meaning are more likely to use that word to make mutual exclusivity inferences about the meaning of other words. We conclude that confidence influences word learning by modulating both information selection processes and inferential processes and discuss the implications of these results for word learning models
Word forms are structured for efficient use
Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort. This observation explains the famous finding that the most frequent words in a language tend to be short. A related prediction is that, even within words of the same length, the most frequent word forms should be the ones that are easiest to produce and understand. Using orthographics as a proxy for phonetics, we test this hypothesis using corpora of 96 languages from Wikipedia. We find that, across a variety of languages and language families and controlling for length, the most frequent forms in a language tend to be more orthographically wellâformed and have more orthographic neighbors than less frequent forms. We interpret this result as evidence that lexicons are structured by language usage pressures to facilitate efficient communication. Keywords: Lexicon; Word frequency; Phonology; Communication; EfficiencyNational Science Foundation (Grant ES/N0174041/1
Learning homophones in context:Easy cases are favored in the lexicon of natural languages
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Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities
Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perceptual confusability (a pressure for dispersion). On the other hand, a lexicon with high phonological regularity would be simpler to learn, remember and produce (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2011) (a pressure for clumpiness). Here we investigate wordform similarity in the lexicon, using measures of word distance (e.g., phonological neighborhood density) to ask whether there is evidence for dispersion or clumpiness of wordforms in the lexicon. We develop a novel method to compare lexicons to phonotactically-controlled baselines that provide a null hypothesis for how clumpy or sparse wordforms would be as the result of only phonotactics. Results for four languages, Dutch, English, German and French, show that the space of monomorphemic wordforms is clumpier than what would be expected by the best chance model according to a wide variety of measures: minimal pairs, average Levenshtein distance and several network properties. This suggests a fundamental drive for regularity in the lexicon that conflicts with the pressure for words to be as phonologically distinct as possible. Keywords: Linguistics; Lexical design; Communication;
Phonotactic
Construire un lexique ambigu
Modern cognitive science of language concerns itself with (at least) two fundamental questions: how do humans learn language? âthe learning problem âand why do the worldâs languages exhibit some properties and not others? âthe typology problem. In this dissertation, I attempt to link these two questions by looking at the lexicon, the set of word-forms and their associated meanings, and ask why do lexicons look the way they are? And can the properties exhibited by the lexicon be (in part) explained by the way children learn their language? One striking observation is that the set of words in a given language is highly ambiguous and confusable. Words may have multiple senses (e.g., homonymy, polysemy) and are represented by an arrangement of a finite set of sounds that potentially increase their confusability (e.g., minimal pairs). Lexicons bearing such properties present a problem for children learning their language who seem to have difficulty learning similar sounding words and resist learning words having multiple meanings. Using lexical models and experimental methods in toddlers and adults, I present quantitative evidence that lexicons are, indeed, more confusable than what would be expected by chance alone. I then present empirical evidence suggesting that toddlers have the tools to bypass these problems given that ambiguous or confusable words are constrained to appear in distinct context. Finally, I submit that the study of ambiguous words reveal factors that were currently missing from current accounts of word learning. Taken together this research suggests that ambiguous and confusable words, while present in the language, may be restricted in their distribution in the lexicon and that these restrictions reflect (in part) how children learn languages.Il y a (au moins) deux questions fondamentales que lâon est amenĂ© Ă se poser lorsquâon Ă©tudie le langage: comment acquiert-on le langage? âle problĂšme dâapprentissage âet pourquoi les langues du monde partagent certaines propriĂ©tĂ©s mais pas dâautres? âle problĂšme typologique. Dans cette thĂšse, jâentreprends de relier ces deux domaines en me focalisant sur le lexique, lâensemble des mots de notre langue et leur sens associĂ©s, en posant les questions suivantes: pourquoi le lexique est-il tel quâil est? Et est-ce que les propriĂ©tĂ©s du lexique peuvent ĂȘtre (en partie) expliquĂ©es par la façon dont les enfants apprennent leur langue? Un des aspects les plus frappants du lexique est que les mots que nous utilisons sont ambigus et peuvent ĂȘtre confondus facilement avec dâautres. En effet, les mots peuvent avoir plusieurs sens (par exemple, les homophones) et sont reprĂ©sentĂ©s par un ensemble limitĂ© de sons qui augmentent la possibilitĂ© quâils soient confondus (par exemple, les paires minimales). Lâexistence de ces mots semble prĂ©senter un problĂšme pour les enfants qui apprennent leur langue car il a Ă©tĂ© montrĂ© quâils ont des difficultĂ©s Ă apprendre des mots dont les formes sonores sont proches et quâils rĂ©sistent Ă lâapprentissage des mots ayant plusieurs sens. En combinant une approche computationnelle et expĂ©rimentale, je montre, quantitativement, que les mots du lexique sont, en effet, plus similaires que ce qui serait attendu par chance, et expĂ©rimentalement, que les enfants nâont aucun problĂšme Ă apprendre ces mots Ă la condition quâils apparaissent dans des contextes suffisamment distincts. Enfin, je propose que lâĂ©tude des mots ambigus permet de rĂ©vĂ©ler des Ă©lĂ©ments importants du mĂ©canisme dâapprentissage du langage qui sont actuellement absents des thĂ©ories actuelles. Cet ensemble dâĂ©tudes suggĂšre que les mots ambigus et les mots similaires, bien que prĂ©sents dans le langage, nâapparaissent pas arbitrairement dans le langage et que leur organisation reflĂšte (en partie) la façon dont les enfants apprennent leur langue
Cross-situational word learning in the right situations.
International audienc
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