Connecting content and logical words

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How well do models of cross-situational word learning account for the learning of ambiguous words?

Existing theories of word learning largely focus on a learner's ability to learn a single meaning for a word despite the fact that many words have multiple meanings. Several computational models of cross-situational word learning have been proposed to explain how words are learned, but it is unknown to what extent they can learn ambiguous words with multiple meanings. Here, we present an experiment showing that adult learners are able to learn multiple meanings of novel ambiguous words in a cross-situational word learning paradigm, and are especially good at doing so when the meanings of the words are related (polysemous) rather than unrelated (homophonous). We evaluated the ability of ten different computational models of cross-situational word learning to explain the empirical data, and none were able to learn the ambiguous words as successfully as the adult learners. Moreover, because these computational models do not represent any semantic information, they are in principle unable to replicate the key difference between polysemous and homophonous word learning found in the study

Subjective confidence influences word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task

International audienceLearning is often accompanied by a subjective sense of confidence in one’s 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

Coordination, rather than pragmatics, shapes colexification when the pressure forefficiency is low.

We investigate the phenomenon of colexification, where a single word form is associated with multiple meanings. Previous research on colexification has primarily focused on empirical studies of different properties of the meanings that determine colexification, such as semantic similarity or meaning frequency. Meanwhile, little attention was paid to the word-forms’ properties, despite being the original approach advocated by Zipf. Our preregistered study examines whether word length influences word choice for colexification using a noveldyadic communication game (N = 64) and a computational model grounded in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework.Contrary to initial predictions, participants did not exhibit a strong preference for efficient colexification (namely colexifying multiple concepts using short words, when long alternatives are available). The results align more closely with a simpler coordination model, where dyads align on a functioning lexical convention with relatively little influence from the efficiency of that convention. Our study highlights the possibility that colexification choices are strongly determined by the pressure for coordination, with weaker influences from semantic similarity or meaning frequency. This is most likely explained by weak pressure for efficiency in our experimental design

Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

International audienceThis study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bébé souris] [a bien mangé]-[the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bébé] [sourit à sa maman]-[the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words

How efficiency shapes human language

We review recent research on the burgeoning topic of how language structure is shaped by principles of efficiency for communication and learning.Work in this area has infused long-standing ideas in linguistics and psychology with new precision and methodological rigor by bringing together information theory, newly available datasets, controlled experimentation, and computational modeling.We review a number of studies that focus on phenomena ranging from the lexicon through syntactic processes, and which deploy formal tools from information theory and probability theory to understand how and why language works the way that it does.These studies show how a pervasive pressure for efficient usage guides the form of natural language and suggest a rich future for language research in connecting linguistics to cognitive psychology and mathematical theories of communication

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

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 well‐formed 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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