Abstract
Across multiple situations, child and adult learners are sensitive to co-occurrences between individual words and their referents in the environment, which provide a means by which the ambiguity of word-world mappings may be resolved (Monaghan & Mattock, 2012; Scott & Fisher, 2012; Smith & Yu, 2008; Yu & Smith, 2007). In three studies, we tested whether cross-situational learning is sufficiently powerful to support simultaneous learning the referents for words from multiple grammatical categories, a more realistic reflection of more complex natural language learning situations. In Experiment 1, adult learners heard sentences comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives, and grammatical markers indicating subject and object roles, and viewed a dynamic scene to which the sentence referred. In Experiments 2 and 3, we further increased the uncertainty of the referents by presenting two scenes alongside each sentence. In all studies, we found that cross-situational statistical learning was sufficiently powerful to facilitate acquisition of both vocabulary and grammar from complex sentence-to-scene correspondences, simulating the situations that more closely resemble the challenge facing the language learner.
Highlights
Learning Vocabulary and Grammar from Cross-Situational Statistics In order to understand an utterance, the language learner has to develop an understanding of the meaning of words within the utterance by acquiring the vocabulary, and determine the grammatical roles of those words from the syntactic structure of the sentence
The results demonstrated that cross-situational statistics are sufficiently powerful to enable adult learners to acquire multiple lexical categories as well as word order patterns, without prior knowledge of either and without feedback
The key result is that all these language features - both vocabulary and word order are learnable as a consequence of information present in cross-situational statistics
Summary
Learning Vocabulary and Grammar from Cross-Situational Statistics In order to understand an utterance, the language learner has to develop an understanding of the meaning of words within the utterance by acquiring the vocabulary, and determine the grammatical roles of those words from the syntactic structure of the sentence. Monaghan, Mattock, Davies, and Smith (2015) further demonstrated that adult learners can acquire nouns and verbs simultaneously, with nouns being learned more quickly than verbs They showed that cross-situational learning is robust even under conditions of increased ambiguity. In natural language learning, the listener hears utterances comprising multi-word sequences composed of words from multiple grammatical categories, and has to learn to map each of these words to objects and actions, their properties and relations between objects and events in the environment. Abstracting over word-order regularities between grammatical categories would not be possible prior to the learning of such grammatical categories
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